D.H. Lawrence's Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader

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D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience

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D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience The Transfiguration of the Reader Charles Michael Burack

D. H. LAWRENCE’S LANGUAGE OF SACRED EXPERIENCE

© Charles Michael Burack, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6845–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burack, Charles. D. H. Lawrence’s language of sacred experience : the transfiguration of the reader / by Charles Burack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1–4039–6845–4 (alk. paper) 1. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Religion and literature—England—History—20th century. 3. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930—Religion. 4. Religious fiction, English—History and criticism. 5. Reader-response criticism. 6. Holy, The, in literature. 7. Religion in literature. I. Title. PR6023.A93Z573 2005 823⬘.912—dc22

2005051026

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my loving parents, Ruth and Elmer Burack

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction One Two Three Four Five

viii 1

The Destruction Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

13

The Revitalization Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

31

Transformative Uses of Kabbalistic Concepts and Terms in The Rainbow

51

Mechanistic and Yogic Discourses in Women in Love

83

The Implosion of the Transformative Pattern in The Plumed Serpent

126

Conclusion

156

Notes

159

Bibliography

186

Index

195

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Alex Zwerdling, John Bishop, and Robert Alter for offering valuable comments on various versions of the manuscript. I also want to thankVirginia Hyde for her valuable comments on the penultimate version. Moreover, I greatly appreciate the enthusiastic support of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America, who awarded me their New Scholar Award 2000–2001 for three articles based on material from this book.The award encouraged me to complete the book. Special thanks to Jack Stewart, Carol Siegel, and Earl Ingersoll for their appreciation of my scholarship. I would also like to thank my dear family and friends. It was ultimately their continuing love, support, and encouragement that made this book possible! Finally, I am grateful to the journals Studies in the Novel, Style, and Mosaic for their reprint permissions and for their support of my work. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Mortifying the Reader:The Assault on Verbal and Visual Consciousness in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in Studies in the Novel 29.4 (Winter 1997) 491–511.An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “Revitalizing the Reader: Literary Technique and the Language of Sacred Experience in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in Style 32.1 (Spring 1998) 102–26. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “The Religious Initiation of the Reader in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow” in Mosaic 33.3 (September 2000) 165–82.

Introduction

On February 24, 1913, a month before he began composing what would become his two greatest novels—The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920)—D. H. Lawrence wrote to the artist Ernest Collings about the numinous nature of his own creative process: I always feel as if I stood for the fire of Almighty God to go through me—and it’s a rather awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious, to be an artist.1 Throughout the rest of his literary career, Lawrence, like the English romantic poets, continued to identify artistic creativity and religious sensibility. In “Introduction to These Paintings” (1929), written a year before his death, he insists that the imagination is an essentially sacred faculty and is energized by bodily feeling: In the flow of our imagination we know in full, mentally and physically at once, in a greater, enkindled awareness.At the maximum of our imagination we are religious. . . . An artist can only create what he really religiously feels is truth, religious truth really felt, in the blood and the bones. (Late Essays 193, 196)2 Critics have examined the nature of Lawrence’s religious ideas and symbols but have skirted the question of how his novels function as religious art.3 This book argues that Lawrence’s major novels, beginning with The Rainbow, can be considered “hierophantic art” in that they seek to evoke sacred experiences in the reader. Indeed, the structure and character of the novels’ narrative textures suggest that Lawrence is trying to play the role of a hierophant; that is, he is acting like the conductor of a religious

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initiation rite who leads novitiates through a series of transformative experiences designed to culminate in the awareness of or union with the divine. Whether or not Lawrence was in any literal sense a hierophant, prophet, or priest is not the point.4 That he conceived of himself as a vatic figure is crucial because it powerfully shaped the kind of novels he produced or attempted to produce. Every prophetic figure aims to bring others closer to divinity, and the most successful prophets bring about a fundamental transformation of consciousness—a conversion experience— in those they have influenced. Lawrence’s visionary ambitions, fed by abiding pantheistic and animistic intuitions, impelled him to try to awaken in his readers a deeply felt experience of the life energy animating the universe. For him, the felt recognition of the aliveness of the cosmos and of one’s fundamental connection to it constitutes the essence of sacred experience. Numinous feelings include wonder, awe, mystery, terror, and a sense of relatedness; these feelings are expressions of the body’s energies and modes of knowing.5 Other important thinkers of the time—like William James, Rudolf Otto, Richard Bucke, and P. D. Ouspensky—also emphasized the primacy of feeling (over reason or doctrine) in sacred experiences.6 As a hierophantic novelist who believed in the unity of body and soul, Lawrence attempted to use language in ways that would touch the reader’s somatic modes of experiencing and responding. He did not merely wish to represent numinous feelings but to evoke them in the reader. Some of these visionary intentions are spelled out in the essays he wrote in the mid-1920s about the nature and role of the novel and the novelist. In “The Future of the Novel,” also titled “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb” (1923), he insists that the novel has to “present us with new, really new feeling, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut” (Study of Thomas Hardy 155). He elaborates on the distinction between new feeling and old emotion in “The Novel and the Feelings” (1935), asserting that the novelist needs to break down the reader’s socialized emotional responses in order to elicit fresh, unknown, “aboriginal” feelings; in doing so, the novelist helps the “so civilized” reader to “un-tame himself ” (Study of Thomas Hardy 201–4). And in “Morality and the Novel” (1925), Lawrence proclaims that visionary art “gives us the feeling of being beyond life or death” (Study of Thomas Hardy 171).This evoking of numinous feeling was the seemingly impossible task he set for himself, and critics have both championed and ridiculed him for this ambition.We examine how Lawrence sought to actualize his religious intentions through the artistic forms he fashioned.

Introduction

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Lawrence thought that sacred feelings are evoked in readers when they experience a deep sense of connection with the visionary work of art, which is itself the numinous product of the artist’s own intense relationships with others. A sacred relationship is one in which polarized wills, beings, or forces exist in dynamic equilibrium.7 Art is an authentic revelation because each “perfected [fully realized] relationship” reveals, brings into being, the divine: “The true God is created every time a pure relationship, or a consummation out of twoness into oneness takes place” (Reflections on the Death 303).8 For Lawrence, the novel is the quintessential religious art because of its ability to represent the complexity and dynamism of human connections: it is “the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered” and the “perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships” (Study of Thomas Hardy 172, 175). The rainbow is one of his primary symbols for numinous connection: as relationships change, so do the aspects or qualities of divinity—the rainbows—that they manifest; each authentic moment of connection produces a new rainbow. In “Why the Novel Matters” (1925), Lawrence characterizes the novel as “the one bright book of life” that “can make the whole man-alive tremble.Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do” (Study of Thomas Hardy 195). He even provocatively describes the Bible as “a great confused novel” that is not so much “about God” but “really about man alive” (Study of Thomas Hardy 195). Whether the Bible is a novel, or the novel a Bible, the equation of the two literary forms implicitly announces Lawrence’s vatic-artistic ambitions. Lawrence believed that sacred experiences occur when a person develops an unselfconscious, impersonal, and spontaneous relationship with another person or being.This relationship must be both mutual and felt, and it is the relationship itself that activates the religious awareness. The relationship is a means to awareness as well as a form of awareness itself: deep connection produces profound reciprocal awareness; expanded awareness enables a full sense of connection.The sacred encounters represented in Lawrence’s novels are experienced by the characters as an influx of passion or peace. Most of these encounters are erotic because Lawrence understood sexual union to be the most important mode of mystical union:“In the act of love . . . Man is with God and of God”; sex is “the deepest of all communions, as all the religions, in practice, know.And it is one of the greatest mysteries, in fact, the greatest, as almost every apocalypse shows, showing the supreme achievement of the mystic marriage” (Study of Thomas Hardy 78;“A Propos of LCL” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover 325). In erotic union, sacred life energies are exchanged between the

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partners, and new life is sometimes created.The numinous experience of passion is associated with the participants’ rhythmic motion and energy as well as their sense of intense, active engagement in and beyond the time-space world of becoming.The experience of peace is related to stillness and silence together with a greater sense of release from the everyday world and of union with the eternal realm of being. The first type of numinous encounter is an immanent experience of divinity; the second a transcendent experience.“Immanence” implies that the divine is experienced as present (showing, manifesting) in the world; “transcendence” implies that the divine is experienced as beyond the world. Evelyn Underhill, whom Lawrence may have read in 1914 or 1915, discusses this distinction in Mysticism (1910).9 Because sacred experiences involve influxes of life energy, they are revitalizing, reenergizing, rejuvenating. Lawrence’s religion was a body-centered vitalism influenced in part by Nietzsche.10 Because of his vitalistic orientation, Lawrence considered his ultimate religious-artistic task to be the revivification of the reader. This revitalization effort has two phases: one to break down the reader’s conventional orientation to self and world, and a second to evoke more vivid and integrated modes of knowing and acting.Thus, he believed, like Nietzsche, that there is a “double rhythm of creating and destroying” in “true art.”11 This “double rhythm” of art corresponds to the two phases of spiritual rebirth: death to the old self; birth of the new self.12 The focus of Lawrence’s demolition effort is the modern Western consciousness, whether Christian or secular. He insisted that this “mental” or “spiritual” consciousness is dominated by conceptual thought, language, and vision. Because mind and will contort and stifle the body’s spontaneous responses, sexual activity is crippled.Thought, speech, hearing, and sight are all modes of consciousness and communication associated with the head or mind, and Lawrence believed that this overemphasis on head-centered consciousness—and consequent underappreciation of the powers of the rest of the body—produces the mind-body split as well as a sense of rupture between self and other. He accepted Nietzsche’s assertion that the fracturing of the Western consciousness was initiated by the ancient Greeks: their highly intellectual and visual culture reified the distinctions within the self, and between self and other.13 In effect, the Greeks made mental distinctions into phenomenal divisions; today, theorists call this mindset a split subjectivity shaped by logocentrism and ocularcentrism.14 This book analyzes the two phases of the revitalization effort in Lawrence’s major novels.I concentrate on his experimentation with various

Introduction

5

literary devices and sacred discourses in his attempt to transform the reader’s consciousness. My focus on the relationships among hierophantic intention, literary technique, and reader response has a secondary aim of reassessing the ideological positions that critics have assigned to Lawrence’s novels.We see, for example, that some of the techniques have ideological values that partially subvert the patriarchal ideology voiced by narrators and characters and thus suggest that Lawrence may have had stronger sympathies with feminism than has been asserted. Feminist attacks on Lawrence’s novels have often overlooked the subversive implications of their formal structures.15 Recently, Carol Siegel has demonstrated that Lawrence was not nearly as antifeminist as has been claimed: he strongly identified with the women’s literary tradition, sought out the literary advice and response of women, and sometimes encouraged women to write.16 Indeed, I believe that Lawrence’s attack on logocentrism and ocularcentrism is implicitly antimasculinist. Feminist theologians, such as Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether, have cited dualistic thought and language as responsible for creating and sustaining the sexist structures in Judaism and Christianity, and Simone de Beauvoir asserts that the dualistic thinking inherent in patriarchal language is responsible for the construction of “woman” as “the Other”—an Other which is presistently associated with the inferior or rejected pole of a whole series of asymmetrical polarities.17 Recent feminist scholarship has linked ocularcentrism and male domination; the Lacanian film critic Laura Mulvey, for example, has examined the objectifying and controlling features of the scopophilic male gaze.18 To interrogate the relation between technique and reader response in Lawrence’s novels, I have developed a poetics of narrative technique, and a phenomenology of the reading experience, that analyze the implied textual effects on the novels’ readers.The investigation does not focus on the actual, historical impact of the novel on readers but rather on potential reader responses suggested by the novel’s textual effects. In short, I concentrate on what Wolfgang Iser calls “the implied reader”: the “network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text.”19 While not limiting myself to Iser’s particular methodology, I show how the textual effects of Lawrence’s novels invite and channel potential reader responses. Actual responses are always unique and involve a dynamic exchange between text and reader: the text verbally prestructures possible responses, and the reader actualizes one or more of those potentials through an act of construction; reading strategies are shaped by the reader’s interpretive community and by idiosyncratic features of the reader’s life and reading experience. Iser argues that one of the

6


main functions of literature is to call into question the reader’s habitual understanding of social conventions. In my analysis of Lawrence’s novels, I am assuming, as Lawrence surely did, a reader who is at least open to being transformed by reading fiction.This “ideal reader” will be simultaneously resistant and receptive to change. Carol Siegel has shown that for many of Lawrence’s novels, this ideal reader was probably female, but my study does not presuppose a female reader; rather, I assume that the literary devices are potentially effective for male and female readers. It should be stressed that I am not suggesting that these techniques generally evoke the effects that Lawrence intended; to the contrary, it is obvious that many critics and ordinary readers do not respond to the devices in the ways he hoped. But I try to elucidate the specific cognitive and emotive effects that Lawrence aimed, sometimes strained, to produce with and through language. The dual rhythm of destroying and creating is also the structure of a religious initiation rite. Lawrence’s novels can be thought of as scripts that enable readers to vicariously experience a sacred-erotic initiation. Lawrence would have learned about initiation rites as early as 1908 from his reading of Theosophy and cultural anthropology and discovered that initiations aim to engender a spiritual rebirth in the novitiate.20 Theosophists Helen Blavatsky and Annie Besant have extensive discussions of initiation rites, as do anthropologists James Frazer and Jane Harrison.21 Initiation rites make use of mortification practices that dissolve the novitiate’s ordinary or profane relationship to self and world; they also employ ritualized procedures for instilling a new, numinous mode of being. I claim that Lawrence, the would-be prophet and hierophant, in effect tries to induct the reader into his own private religion—a religion that stresses the interrelatedness of all beings and the ability to experience that connection through feeling, especially sexual feeling. Initiation is the explicit thematic focus of The Plumed Serpent, but it is also of thematic importance in The Rainbow and in nearly all the novels that followed it. In The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the more successful couples are transfigured by their erotic encounters; and in each case, it is the relationship itself that functions as the hierophantic force.22 The degree of initiation of the characters is a result of the degree of interrelatedness: the more fully and deeply the lovers are connected, the more complete their experience of divine passion or peace. Often, the language that Lawrence uses to portray the characters’ progressively more intense numinous encounters is meant to have an escalating hierophantic effect on readers. Lawrence’s interest in enabling the reader to experience sacred energy is less idiosyncratic when it is understood that influential Theosophists

Introduction

7

like Annie Besant were claiming that the culminating point of initiation in many Western esoteric societies and eastern religions is “when the Initiate became a God, whether by union with a divine Being outside himself, or by the realization of the divine Self within him. This was termed ecstasy.”23 The Theosophists considered Jesus, Buddha, and other Initiates into the “Mysteries” to be “Sons of God” and “Saviours of the world” who had manifested their own divine powers.24 Lawrence often uses the phrase “Son of God” to describe characters in the throes of numinous erotic passion. Lawrence’s belief in the spiritual power of art was shared by mainstream theologians. For example, the German theologian Rudolf Otto believed that numinous feelings can be evoked by stimulating “kindred and similar feelings belonging to the ‘natural’ sphere” and to art.25 It is the metaphorical relation of nature and spirit, and of art and spirit, that enables the one to induce the other.26 According to Otto, “He who ‘in the spirit’ reads the written word lives in the numinous, though he may have neither notion of it nor name for it” (61). The destructive phase of an initiation rite usually involves purification or mortification practices. In her discussion of the mystery rites of the ancient Greeks, Jane Harrison argues that the essence of a mystery is not “secrecy” but “purification in order that you might safely eat and handle certain sacra.”27 Body and mind must be cleansed of impurities before there can be contact with holy things. Evelyn Underhill, in her analysis of the education of Christian mystical consciousness, also stresses the importance of purification: Christian mystics put themselves through painful, lengthy mortification practices to rid themselves of sinful thoughts and feelings and to prevent the commission of future transgressions.28 The destruction phase of Lawrence’s novels aims to purify readers’ consciousness so that they can have a more sacred—energetic, integrated, healthy, wondrous, reverential—relationship to life, especially erotic life. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the narrator presents Lawrence’s belief in purification when he asserts that an important function of the novel is to “lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead” and thus “cleans[e]” the reader’s “sensitive awareness” (101). Because Lawrence saw the reader’s consciousness as tainted and fragmented by excessive thought, reflexivity, and vision, one of his general mortification strategies is to use literary devices that call attention to the splits in the reader’s consciousness between self and other, mind and body, ego and unconscious. Some of his devices exaggerate the verbal and visual features of modern consciousness associated with these splits: dualism, verbosity, visuality, self-consciousness, conceptualization, objectification, accentuated

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time-space sense. By using devices that amplify the ruptures in the reader’s consciousness, Lawrence in effect completes the splintering process: he shatters, kills off (mortifies), the reader’s split subjectivity and prepares the way for new, numinous forms of awareness. Lawrence’s splintering techniques anticipate many of the devices used by postmodernist writers. However, many of the later writers revel in these splits rather than seek to overcome them. The sacralization phase of initiation rites seeks to create the awareness of or union with divinity. Lawrence wanted the reader to become fully aware of the sacred energies at work in erotic exchange.This intention is also alluded to by the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who says that another function of the novel is to “inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness” and thereby “freshen” or revitalize the reader’s awareness in relation to sexual activity (101). Some of the devices that Lawrence uses to rejuvenate the reader resemble those used in meditative and contemplative practices: visualization and repetition devices are often used to convey how characters’ bodies dynamically register erotic experiences.29 To transform the reader’s relationship to eroticism, Lawrence needed a new religious-erotic vocabulary. Rather than inventing new terms, as the later Joyce did, he selected words from extant discourses and transvalued them. Like Nietzsche, he believed that the transvaluation of language often requires the recovery and resuscitation of terms that once had great emotive power. I examine Lawrence’s attempts to eroticize religious language and to sacralize sexual and organic discourses.Two general strategies include the sensualization of Christian terms that ordinarily have a purely spiritual (disembodied) meaning as well as the reliteralization of erotic metaphors for mystical union. Lawrence also experimented with a variety of esoteric discourses, particularly from those traditions in which the erotic body has sacred value: Jewish Kabbalah, and Tantric Yoga (a Hindu and Buddhist tradition). Much of his knowledge of these discourses came from reading the Theosophists. I argue that the two transformative phases are associated with different narratorial consciousnesses or narrative textures. The contrasting style, tone, vocabulary, and function of these differing narrative voices suggests two different narrators: one who attacks, shatters, and mortifies; and one who reintegrates and reenergizes. In most of the novels, the narrators— or narratorial modes—alternate: passages attempting to mortify the reader are followed by ones aimed at revitalization, and these in turn are succeeded by passages seeking to further purify the reader’s consciousness.30 Lawrence analogized the gradual transformation of consciousness to that

Introduction

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of a snake sloughing off its skin: as the old skin is slowly sloughed off, it is gradually replaced by new skin. He wanted readers to slowly slough off their fragmented, nonvital modes of knowing and relating and to experience more unified and vital modes. Many of the novels end with a passage or series of passages that seem aimed at destroying the new mode of consciousness that Lawrence has worked so hard to evoke in the reader. This final disintegrative effort destabilizes the dogmatic assertions voiced by narrators and characters. I interpret such endings as Lawrence’s attempt to free readers of any overattachment to the particulars of the sacred encounters that have been depicted; ultimately, readers must learn for themselves, in a full-bodied way, what numinous erotic experience is. I begin my analysis with Lady Chatterley’s Lover because it represents Lawrence’s most deliberate and developed attempt to structure his novels as a sacred transformative process—a religious initiation rite—for the reader. Lady Chatterley reveals the basic features of the hierophantic pattern and serves as a fully articulated paradigm for analyzing Lawrence’s earlier attempts at creating the initiatory design. In chapter 1, I examine the destructive phase of Lady Chatterley, which dominates the first half of the novel; and in chapter 2, I discuss the vivification phase, which centers on the erotic encounters between Connie and Mellors in the second half.The main organizing device for the novel’s mortification phase is a satiric narrator who bombards the reader with intensely visual, verbal, scientific, and reflexive analyses of the sexual attitudes and actions of Clifford Chatterley and his Cambridge colleagues, and of young Connie and her sister Hilda.The principal organizing technique of the sacralization phase is a narrative consciousness that transforms the conventional categories of the novel: instead of offering the characters’ visual and conceptual perspectives, this narrator presents psychonarrations of the nonverbal experiences of their bodies, and uses tactile focalizations to convey the shifting sensations and feelings registered by hands, genitalia, and torsos.31 These focalizations exploit the physical dimensions of language—its phonic resonances and rhythms—as well as the power of language to cancel or overcome itself in contradiction, paradox, and negation and thus release nonlinguistic forms of awareness in the reader. The techniques and discourses used in the last four sex scenes reveal Lawrence attempting to destroy the initiatory pattern that has been so deliberately shaped. Having examined how the fully formed transformational pattern operates in Lady Chatterley, I turn to Lawrence’s early attempts to construct the pattern. In The Rainbow, the subject of chapter 3, the

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destruction–sacralization rhythm is actually repeated four times: once in the eroticized portrayal of the anonymous premodern Brangwen generations, and again in the depiction of the sexual encounters of each of the three named, and progressively more modern, generations—those of Tom and Lydia, Anna and Will, and Ursula and Anton. The pattern is also reversed, with the vivification phase appearing first and gradually giving way to a disintegrative phase.This is the only novel in which the standard initiatory order of mortify-then-revitalize is reversed. As readers proceed through the novel, they experience a fourfold rhythm of rising and falling energy and of integrated and splintered forms of awareness. Moreover, I concentrate on Lawrence’s transvaluation of Kabbalistic language in the erotic episodes. Lawrence found the Jewish esoteric tradition—and the Christian Kabbalistic tradition spawned from it—an attractive source of symbols because it draws on Biblical language familiar to his readers, uses this language in startlingly strange ways, is more body-centered than most conventional Christian discourses, and offers a full set of gendered symbols of divine energy as well as erotic metaphors of sacred union. Lawrence’s knowledge of Kabbalah was largely derived from the Theosophists, who considered Jewish mystical teachings to be a version of the primeval “secret doctrine.”32 He may have also been familiar with the writings of: the influential Rosicrucian Kabbalist Eliphas Levi, author of Transcendental Magic (1896); S. L. MacGregor Mathers, translator of The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1900) and a founder of the Golden Dawn Society that claimed Yeats as a member; and Hermeticist A. E. Waite, author of The Holy Kabbalah (1912).33 I show that the vitalizing passages in The Rainbow are replete with Kabbalistic mystical expressions, while the mortifying passages are dominated by magic terms. The mysticism–magic distinction is important because Lawrence associated mysticism with an unselfconscious, receptive, unitive experience and with balanced, reciprocal encounters, while he saw magic as a selfish, manipulative, and knowledge-driven activity that produces unbalanced, hierarchical relationships. Chapter 4 concentrates on the use of scientific and quasi-scientific discourses in the sex scenes in Women in Love. In the novel’s disintegrative phase, Lawrence conflates mechanistic and magical discourses because he considers the motivating force behind both magic and mechanistic science to be the twin will to knowledge and power. Mechanistic science, in his view, is even more pernicious than magic not only because of its destructive potential when (mis)applied in industry and on the battlefield but also because it de-animates the universe. Lawrence’s understanding of

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mechanism was probably influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.34 In the works of William James and P. D. Ouspensky, he found a powerful critique of mechanistic and positivistic science. Throughout the mortifying scenes in Women in Love, mechanistic discourse is associated with egoistic willfulness, violence, death, disequilibrium, logocentrism, and ocularcentrism. In the novel’s vivifying phase, Lawrence draws on the terminology of Eastern mysticism in an attempt to forge a startling, attractive, quasi-scientific alternative to the Western mechanistic model of relationships.35 He makes use of the language of the Hindu system of yoga, especially Tantric yoga, which is a training method designed to lead aspirants to sacred union and integration through proper stimulation and alignment of the body’s centers of energy and consciousness.Tantric yoga is, in part, the art of sacred sexuality and focuses on arousing and channeling erotic energy or “serpent power” for the purpose of simultaneous union with one’s sexual partner and with divinity. Lawrence’s main source for Tantric yoga is again the Theosophists: both Blavatsky and Besant discuss yoga; also, Richard Pryse, a student of Blavatsky, wrote a yogic interpretation of the Book of Revelation called The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910), which Lawrence read in 1915–16. Lawrence uses yoga terms like “chakra” in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, which he considers his own half-serious effort at formulating a “subjective science”—a “science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition.”36 Yoga posits that the body has various chakras, which are centers of energy and consciousness. My analysis of The Plumed Serpent in chapter 5 shows that Lawrence’s effort to initiate the reader has become overly selfconscious, insistent, and distorted. His didactic imperative has now taken on an authoritarian twist and too often drives and distorts narrative development. In trying too explicitly to control the representation of his religious ideology and its effects on the characters and the reader, Lawrence makes significant literary errors of commission and omission: he manufactures implausible or distorted characters and situations, and refrains from presenting perspectival details that would make these implausibilities and distortions more evident to the reader.These latter techniques reveal a desire, conscious or unconscious, to cover up the untenable and unpersuasive features of the novel.The novel’s technical problems simultaneously disclose the difficulties that were always inherent in Lawrence’s initiatory aims and undermine any forced attempt to transform the reader. I focus on the weaknesses in the novel’s sacralization phase since the passages dealing with the portrayal of the Quetzalcoatl rituals—meditations, dances,

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ceremonies, hymns—are the most innovative, flawed, and disturbing in the book. I conclude by assessing the overall trajectory of Lawrence’s hierophantic–artistic practices. I also argue that a poetics of literary technique gains depth and scope by yoking it to a phenomenology of reader response.This integrative approach is particularly powerful for examining the potential cognitive and affective impacts of literature on the reader.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Destruction Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

In late October 1926, two weeks after telling Frieda he would “never write another novel,” Lawrence began writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.1 He finished the third and final version in January 1928. His letters from that period indicate he powerfully identified with the novel and considered it as precious and frail as his self. Fearing public outcry and government censorship, he initially had no desire to publish the manuscript. Only after considering private publication did he resolve to rewrite and publish the work. While some critics have considered the novel one of the worst of his major fictions, he thought it a consummation of his creative efforts: It’s what the world would call very improper. But you know it’s not really improper—I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful.And this novel is the furthest I’ve gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is, and I shrink very much even from having it typed. Probably the typist would interfere.2 In contrast to this positive self-assessment, even so extreme an advocate as F. R. Leavis considers the novel overly “deliberate” and “calculated.”3 And Michael Squires, who has studied the novel’s composition, deems it “schematic” (168). My analysis of the novel’s language shows that despite the sexual explicitness, the somewhat schematic structure, and the occasional stylistic heavyhandedness, the representations of eroticism are much more complex and subtle than has been realized.While the plot is

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relatively straightforward, and most of the characters—with the exception of Connie and Mellors—are flat, the literary devices and discourses are carefully crafted. Indeed, these techniques serve a two-pronged religious intention: to purge the reader’s consciousness of conventional sexual ideas and emotions and to generate new numinous responses. What critics have generally overlooked in Lady Chatterley, and what I stress, are the techniques that Lawrence uses to effect transformations of the reader’s consciousness. There have been few studies of the novel’s structure and even fewer of its technique.The investigations of structure generally focus on its content and neglect its texture.4 And the studies of technique usually fail to relate technique to artistic intention.5 An interesting textural analysis of the novel’s structure is offered by Joan Peters. She proposes that its “quality of language and tone” indicate it has two narrators: a Cliffordlike narrator who narrates the first half of the novel, and a Mellorslike narrator who narrates the second half.6 However, while Peters is justified in identifying more than one narrator, she overlooks the fact that the “Clifford” half of the novel contains many moments of vital consciousness, and the “Mellors” half contains many scenes of deadening consciousness.7 She fails to realize that two types of narrative consciousness in fact oscillate, the one waning as the latter waxes. She also does not detect hybrid or intermediate forms of narratorial and figural consciousness which occur as Connie’s sexual initiation is in its early stages. I believe it is the neglect of the reader that has kept Peters and other investigators from seeing the novel’s waxing and waning structure.8 My claim is that one set of devices and discourses is intended to mortify the reader’s consciousness while another set aims to energize and unify the reader’s awareness and thereby evoke a sacred experience. In the first half of the novel, the first set dominates; in the second half, the second set dominates; but both sets are present throughout because the purgation and vivification phases are oscillating, the former waning as the latter waxes. In this chapter, I analyze the disintegrative devices; in the next chapter, I examine the sacralizing techniques. Both chapters focus on Lawrence’s detailed concern with selecting and arranging language at the levels of scene, paragraph, and sentence and show how complex forms are used to channel reader responses.This detailed shaping at the local level contrasts with the somewhat schematic simplicity of the plot. Even at the local level, however, the prose sometimes becomes overly calculated, as we shall see. In structuring this and other novels, Lawrence had to steer between imposing a rigid form and writing without any forethought.The novels had to be organized enough to guide his readers’ responses through

The Destructive Phase

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the phases of transformation but not so orderly that they took on the stultifyingly mechanical shape he sought to destroy. The destruction phase begins with the opening chapter and is most intense in the first half of the 19-chapter novel. Chapters I–IV are completely dominated by scenes with a mortifying aim, and such scenes also predominate in Chapters V–IX.While these scenes also occur in the novel’s second half, they do so with much less frequency and duration. Conversely, vitalizing episodes achieve maximum frequency and intensity in the novel’s second half. The sex scenes between Connie and Mellors do not start until Chapter X, but the vitalization phase is perceptible as early as Chapter V, when the sacred diction and vivifying techniques are used to introduce Mellors to the reader.This overlapping of the mortifying and vivifying phases resembles the overlapping subjective and objective phases in Yeats’s symbolic model of personal and collective development.9 While Yeats represents this overlapping of the “antithetical” and “primary” phases as two interpenetrating gyres, Lawrence uses the image of a snake sloughing off its skin: the new flesh emerges as the old flesh disintegrates. The novel’s mortification devices have both conceptual and emotive functions.The main conceptual function is to make readers aware of the destructive and deadening features of their sexual consciousness and action and to induce them to repudiate these nonvital modes of knowing and relating. Lawrence developed devices that call attention to the splits in the reader’s consciousness between self and other, mind and body, ego and unconscious. Some of the novel’s techniques exaggerate the verbal and visual features of modern consciousness associated with these splits: dualism, verbosity, visuality, reflexivity, conceptualization, objectification, accentuated time-space sense. By using devices that amplify the splits in the reader’s consciousness, Lawrence in effect completes the splintering process: he shatters, kills off, the reader’s moribund erotic ideas and orientations and prepares the way for new, more vital and integrative forms of consciousness.Thus, Lawrence uses the analytic tools of the modern mind against itself. In fact, he thought the great benefit of critical self-reflection was its ability to dismember itself by realizing its own limitations and fabrications. For him, the ultimate self-purification is to realize that the sacred energies of life, especially those experienced in passionate encounters, cannot be known conceptually. Critical reflection is thus most useful when it gives rise to silence, thereby paving the way for ineffable numinous experiences. It is important to emphasize that Lawrence’s attack on logocentrism and ocularcentrism is implicitly anti-masculinist. Feminist attacks on

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Lady Chatterley have generally overlooked the subversive implications of its formal structures. For example, Simone de Beauvoir, who criticizes the novel as masculinist, does not seem to realize that Lawrence shares her belief that the dualistic thinking inherent in patriarchal language is responsible for the construction of “woman” as “the Other.”10 Kate Millett supports her critique of the novel by citing masculinist statements made by Mellors but ignores passages that undercut those messages.11 She also fails to attend to broader negational structures that undermine all dogmatic assertions made within the novel.12 Recent feminist thinkers have cited dualistic thought and language as responsible for generating and enforcing sexist structures in Judaism and Christianity.13 They have also linked ocularcentrism to male domination.14 Lawrence’s hyperbolic use of dualistic modes of consciousness to dismantle those very modes is analogous to feminist appropriations of traditionally masculine rhetorical devices in order to subvert male power.15 The main emotive function of the mortification devices is to evoke in readers various forms of emotional repulsion toward modern sexuality: boredom, irritation, anger, rage. Many of Lawrence’s Christian readers had been reared to repress rage. He believed that the more visceral the reader’s repulsion, the more likely it was to be a “really new feeling” (Study of Thomas Hardy 155). Lawrence’s desire to release the reader’s rage has feminist implications since critics such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have argued that feminist literature positively values female expressions of anger.16 Repulsion is also a form of suffering, and Lawrence thought that suffering could be either purgative or obstructive. He believed that a “really new novel” produces pain and resistance, but the resistance can be overcome.17 By stripping away readers’ defensive, egoistic shell—what Wilhelm Reich calls “character armor”—the narrator of Lady Chatterley places them in direct contact with the suffering brought on by their sexual, asexual, or antisexual attitudes and practices.18 The mortifying function of Lady Chatterley is implied in the narrator’s description of the novel’s power to lead the reader’s sympathy away from old, dead things: It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional


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secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. (101) In the novel’s first “rhythm,” the narrator seeks to repulse and “cleanse” the reader’s consciousness; in its second rhythm, a second narrator, with a very different consciousness and style, tries to “properly handle” language to “freshen” the reader’s “sensitive awareness,” much as Mellors and Connie channel the flux and reflux of their sensual energies by the proper handling of each other’s bodies.The fact that “the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow” indirectly informs readers that the novel’s narrative texture will itself oscillate as the two narrators alternate: one narrator seeking to lead readers away from dead things, and the other attempting to lead them toward living beings.The emphasis on sympathy is reminiscent of the sentimental novel, but unlike the sentimental novelist, Lawrence is not trying to evoke conventional sympathetic responses to familiar social situations, but to elicit compassion in just those areas excluded by nineteenth-century fiction: sexual relations. Disintegrative techniques occur in the descriptive, narrative, and dialogal modes of the novel and are most prominent in the narrator’s representations of the characters’ sexual attitudes, actions, and speech.The highly mediated psychonarrations reflect the narrator’s own “modern” consciousness as much as the characters’.The novel’s mortification phase is thus narrated by a “modern” critical narrator, who, like Clifford, “was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits: except that it was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited” (50). This narrator tries to tear to bits the reader’s split consciousness. A different narratorial consciousness is used to depict the sexual relationship between Connie and Mellors because only a new or transformed narrator can reinvigorate the reader. Destructive devices can be found in: (1) the narrator’s general satiric and parodic approach and excessive time-consciousness; (2) the head-centered narration of the youthful sexual activities of young Connie and Hilda; (3) the ocularcentric portrayals of Clifford and Michaelis and of Connie just before she meets Mellors; (4) the vision-dominated representations of Connie’s affair with Mick; and (5) the hyperintellectual discussions of sex by Clifford and his Cambridge friends. Throughout the mortification phase, the narrator often resorts to satire when describing a character’s behavior.The distinguishing features of satire make it useful for Lawrence’s disintegrative intention.These features include: narratorial distance, irony, dissection, ridicule. Each feature

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represents a cut or split. Distance is perhaps the primary characteristic because the other qualities follow from it. That is, the narrator’s distant point of view—what Lawrence calls “knowing in terms of apartness”— establishes a profound rupture between the observing narrator and the observed characters (“Apropos of LCL” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover 331). Into the gap opened by irony, the narrator pours invectives against figural consciousness and action. The characters are ridiculed to the point of caricature or character assassination. Significantly, the narrator describes satire as a mode of sympathy: “one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy” (101). But the severity of narrator’s representations often violates the very standard he sets forth. He does not seem to respect or even want to sympathize with such struggling, battered souls as Clifford and Michaelis. When describing them, he usually slides from discrimination to dissection. In fact, some critics have suggested that the satiric representation of Clifford is virtually devoid of sympathy. Michael Squires shows that the successive versions of the novel reveal Lawrence progressively winnowing the sympathetic qualities in Clifford as well as trimming Connie’s and the narrator’s sympathetic responses to him. I would argue that this paring was done in large measure to meet the novel’s destructive aim.This aim is often pursued so relentlessly that sympathy is abolished. By assassinating the characters, the narrator also commits a self-destructive act, for he has negated his own compassion. Lawrence thus reveals that when satire—even his own—is pushed to the extreme, it becomes selfdefeating. He was particularly antipathetic toward the irreverent satire of the Bloomsbury circle, here approximated by Clifford’s circle of Cambridge friends.19 The narrator’s severity indicates an unconscious hostility, the very hostility that Tommy Dukes diagnoses in himself and his comrades.The narrator’s intellectual spite toward the characters suggests he has not only repressed the fundamental connectedness between himself and the characters but has also projected his own malevolent qualities onto them. That is, as a dualistic thinker, he experiences the same repression and projection as the characters he dissects.20 The narrator hates in the Cambridge crowd the very qualities he hates—half consciously, half unconsciously—in himself.Thus, he represents them in two ways: he not only portrays them but is also their representative (he is one of them). In the depictions of Connie and Mellors’s erotic relationship, which are intended to revitalize the reader’s consciousness, the new narrator has a


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different view of satire and sometimes admonishes Connie’s biting reactions to the lovemaking. For example, in Chapter XII, when Connie ridicules Mellors’s sexual “performance,” the narrator comments, “Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart” (172). This new or renewed narratorial consciousness is aware that satiric corrosiveness might go so far as to destroy a person or relationship. An important function of Lawrence’s mortification techniques is to make readers aware that their modern sexual consciousness has a larger psychosocial context. By using discourses from modern science, commerce, and art, the narrator subliminally tells readers that a “mental” consciousness not only shapes their erotic lives but also structures most modern institutions. Thus, Lawrence highlights what Foucault would call the “episteme” underlying the discourses that define and control sexuality.21 Throughout Chapter I, the narrator uses the language of science to satirize young Connie and Hilda and parody the omnipresent scientistic mindset. Scientific discourse emphasizes categorization, explanation, prediction, and control. The overuse of abstract words, compound-terms, and noun phrases suggests that the sisters’ erotic experiences have been filtered, reduced, and governed by their rational minds.22 What “mattered supremely” to Connie and Hilda was not “the sex thing” or “love experience” but “the impassioned interchange of talk” (7–8).“Sex thing” suggests the scientific tendency to objectify phenomena, and “impassioned interchange of talk” reads like jargon from a social psychology textbook. Hyphenated phrases like “sex-thrill” and “love-making” resemble chemical compounds, and the hyphen accentuates the dualism built into scientific thought. The plethora of conjoined abstract nouns is precisely what George Orwell will later identify as one of the “mental vices” of writers living in an age wedded to scientific abstractions and political orthodoxy.23 In Lady Chatterley, the continued repetition of these abstract phrases is intended to have an annoying effect on readers.This annoyance could intensify to anger or modulate to boredom. In fact, the narrator repeats “sex” ad nauseam in order to indicate its nearly null meaning and to further negate any lingering sense. In two short, successive paragraphs, “sex” is repeated six times: “sex business . . . sexual love . . . sex thing . . . sex . . . sex thing . . . sexual intercourse” (7–8).The insistent repetition acts like the blows of Mellors’s hammer that startle and shatter Connie’s consciousness. In Chapter VI, “sex” is said to be one of “the great words” that, “it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation” (62). The novel’s destruction phase tries to cancel out the dead or deadening meanings of these once great words so that they can be later invested with some of the religious power

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of pagan fertility rites. In short, “sex” will be redefined, revalued, and recharged in the erotic scenes involving Connie and Mellors.24 The repetitions of “sex” also indicate the ubiquitous presence of this term in scientific and popular discourse during the first decades of the century. To the sister’s scientific minds, the words “sex” and “love” are so abstract and empty that their semantic differences are almost nonexistent. The narrator reinforces the sense of interchangeability by placing the words in alternating paragraphs: “It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. . . . In the actual sex thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed” (9). Sex and love have been reduced not only to each other but also to a “physical experience.”That is, their meanings have been limited to those assigned by the mechanistically oriented physical sciences. Lawrence tends to use the adjective “sensual” rather than “physical” when valorizing an unselfconscious bodily experience; he sometimes uses “sensuous” to describe the self-conscious, physical experiences that he deplores.25 Freud had hoped to reduce psychoanalysis to a physiological science, expressing this aim as early as 1895 in “Psychology for Neurologists” and as late as 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.26 P. D. Ouspensky, an important influence on Lawrence’s understanding of the relations among religion, science, and philosophy, considered physicalism the defining characteristic of positivist science:“positivism looks for causes of biological and psychological phenomena in physico-mechanical phenomena.”27 A scientific or commercial consciousness that can lump diverse phenomena is itself lumpable—that is, generic and therefore fungible. In fact, the narrator lumps Connie and Hilda together as he describes their sexual behavior. In thirteen successive paragraphs the girls are usually treated in the plural:“They had to be taken to Paris and Florence. . . . So they had given the gift of themselves. . . . Both sisters had had their love experience. . . . They loved their respective young men. . . . In the actual sex thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed” (6–9). The extensive use of summary in these paragraphs also suggests the abstractness of the sisters’ lives. In effect, the narrator presents the scientific “results” and “conclusions” of their teenage years.This general tendency toward abstraction reinforces the reduction, and thus assists the subjugation, of women. The abstractness and interchangeability of the sisters’ experiences also suggest that they and their experiences have become commodified. Even the modern woman is portrayed as a commodity: Tommy Dukes, a spokesman for Lawrence, criticizes Arnold Hammond for allowing his “strong property instinct” to govern his relationship with his wife Julia, who “is labelled Mrs. Arnold B. Hammond” (32). Lawrence


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thus links the categorizations and reifications in science to those in business. Minds wedded to naming things come to love words more than the things they represent, to prefer talk to action, and to use language to exploit people. The narrator emphasizes the sisters’ logocentric preference for intellectual discourse over sex, which is considered “only a sort of primitive reversion, and a bit of an anti-climax” (7). Words are so important to Connie and Hilda that they require verbal engagement before they can be sexually aroused, for neither is “ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, talking to one another” (8). Words are thus conceptual tools that induce or coerce a physical response. The instrumental value of words is related to the instrumental value of sex partners, who are “merely a tool” for achieving orgasm (8). In current theoretical terms, the manmade logos that subjugates women’s bodies and experiences can also be used by women to control men; it is a weapon in the hands of either sex.Yet when the word dominates in sexuality, all suffer. The sisters’ lives are so shaped by verbal intercourse that their sexual encounters can be seen as textualized: And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme. (8) The sisters’ lives have become books divided into chapters, and they treat sex as a conversation ending a chapter. Sex is thus represented as part of and defined by a larger social script. For the sisters, there is no spontaneity, no unpredictability, and the whole erotic process is prescribed, set under way by language. Sex-after-talk is as “inevitable” as effect-after-cause in a scientific experiment. A woven intellectual product—a text—determines the pattern for the weaving together of human bodies.And an orgasm (“a final spasm”) is textualized as a row of asterisks ending a paragraph or indicating a thematic break. Rather than culminating a deep emotional and tactile connection, it ends a verbal one. Instead of producing a new “theme,” it constitutes a break. Energy is depleted, bled out, not created. By describing the sisters’ textualization of sex, the narrator implicitly signals readers to be aware of how sex is textualized in the novel—and in their own lives.

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The positivitic science of Lawrence’s day emphasized the measurement of time and space. It sliced up the world into discrete phenomena and objects and thus assigned qualities and magnitudes to what is actually a seamless, ever-fluctuating time-space matrix. Moreover, scientists measured past events and predicted future outcomes while often slighting the present moment.28 In Chapter I, the narrator’s own preoccupation with past time-space events is revealed by the dizzying weaving back and forth from one discrete year to another, and from one isolated place to others. This zigzagging strategy is intended to disorient readers and make them realize how their own thought processes operate.The opening paragraph refers to Connie’s tragic view of modernity sometime after World War I, but the specific period and location are not indicated.The narrator then joltingly shifts between the youth and young adulthood of Connie, Clifford, and their siblings. The vague sense of the present moment, together with the dizzying narratorial movements in this short (8-page) chapter, enacts Lawrence’s view of the modern consciousness: unrootedness in the now, and aimlessly wandering and wondering in memory and expectation. In fact, both retrospection and speculation, as their common Indo-European root spek (“to observe”) indicates, are cognitive processes strongly tied to visuality. In Proust, Lawrence saw the fullest fictional expression of these zigzagging processes.29 Mental wandering through past and future is the temporal analog of the trope of the wandering hero; but whereas the ancient hero succeeded in transforming himself through his deeds, the modern protagonist often seems to get nowhere in his mental travels.30 Lawrence’s narrator in effect parodies Proust. Lawrence’s attack on the reader’s ocularcentrism is particularly strong in Chapters II and III.The general strategy is to flood the reader’s consciousness with visual, especially specular, language. The narrator’s descriptions of Connie’s adult consciousness emphasize her hypervisual subjectivity prior to meeting Mellors. Specular metaphors are used to characterize her perception of the world and herself. She experiences the Wragby household as “spectral” and the wood as “like the simulacrum of reality” (18). The oak leaves appear as if “seen ruffling in a mirror,” and she appears to herself as “a figure somebody had read about” (18). Like Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott, she experiences self and surroundings at a distance, mirrored in mind, cut off from a felt sense of reality. This ocularcentrism is associated with past- and word-centered experience: the primroses seem “only shadows or memories, or words” (18). But while the mirror of Connie’s mind prevents her from experiencing the cosmos, an actual mirror enables her and readers to see the signs of damage done to her by Wragby’s mental lifers. In the mirror she sees


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how masculine logocentric culture has harmed the female body. As she carefully inspects her body in a “huge mirror,” readers are introduced, through her thoughts, to the language of the weak, debilitated, immature body:“And she thought . . . what a frail, easily-hurt, rather pathetic thing a naked human body is; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!” (70). When the narrator depicts her specific body parts (breasts, belly, thighs), he uses adjectives indicating organic decay and stunted growth: “greyish,” “sapless,”“opaque,”“unripe,”“bitter,”“dull,”“slack, flat, meaningless” (70). Cumulatively, these adjectives are intended to depress the reader. In fact, Connie’s self-inspection leaves her feeling “immensely depressed and hopeless” until suddenly she hates “[t]he mental life” for being a “swindle!” (71).To contemporary readers familiar with the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the scene might suggest a regression to the mirror stage in which the child identifies with her image in the mirror, but here the image is degraded, not ideal.31 It is as if Connie, nearly destroyed by subjection to the oedipal law-logos of the father, returns to the preoedipal mirror to observe the damage done to her bodily identity. Connie’s hatred constitutes a self and social criticism that facilitates the breakdown of her old mode of consciousness, thus further preparing her for a new one. Lawrence wants readers to undergo a similar deterioration and renovation of consciousness.The mirror’s usefulness in reflecting bodily decay indicates the mind’s role in diagnosing the symptoms of the modern malaise.This is a disease the mind has wrought, can detect, and can even dissect but cannot cure. Some of the novel’s narrative devices, especially those related to point of view, are designed to call attention to the sensory, cognitive, and communication organs of the head—brain, eye, mouth, and to a lesser extent, the ear. The reader thus comes to realize that a verbal–visual consciousness gives undeserved priority to the activities associated with one part of the body—the head. This partial but dominant form of consciousness is both too “heady” and too imperious: it belittles or blocks the modes of knowing and being associated with the rest of the body.Thus, Lawrence saw the Western project of Enlightenment, which Freud sanctioned as the ego’s rational conquest of the id, as a despotic enterprise in which the head subjugated all other organs and limbs. It is also a fetishistic project that endows undue power and prestige to headdriven activities. The psychonarrations of Clifford and Michaelis underscore their head-dominated consciousness, particularly their hypervisuality. The narrator implies that their ocularcentrism is linked to sexual ennui, impotence, violence, and possessiveness.This eye-centeredness is suggested

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by the use of specular metaphors to represent the ways these “modern” men perceive the world and present themselves in it.Vision metaphors are used to characterize Clifford’s perceptual and affective relations to the world. He sees the “field of life” as “largely an artificially-lighted stage” (16).And since his “extraordinary and peculiar” powers of “observation” have “no actual contact” with the subject matter,“[i]t was as if the whole thing took place on an artificial earth” (16). His desire for human connection has been sublimated into a scopically structured interest in people: “He was remotely interested: but like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope” (16). Both instruments, by extending the powers of the eye, intensify the tyranny of sight.32 Readers of Lady Chatterley are implicitly accused of sharing Clifford’s vacuous, visual approach to living, for his “stories were curiously true to modern life— to the modern psychology, that is” (16). Finally, Clifford’s very instincts are permeated by hypervisuality: he has a “publicity instinct” that enables him to “discover new channels” for “advertis[ing]” himself (21).This is a desire to be seen, rather than to see. Clifford continues to crave anonymous attention because he cannot experience personal fulfillment. The narrator insinuates that Clifford’s craving for self-display has sexual origins: the erotic instinct that once sought to allure particular females has been transformed into a “blind, imperious instinct to become known . . . to the vast amorphous world he did not himself know, and of which he was uneasily afraid” (21). It is as if his castration anxiety fuels a desire to be seen by many, rather than touched by one. In the portrayal of Michaelis’s consciousness, theatrical discourse is also tied to scientific discourse, and the two languages are connected to distance, analysis, control, and deception. Laura Mulvey has emphasized the active, controlling, narcissistic, and sadistic dimensions of the scopophilic male gaze.33 Mick is a scopophilic playwright with a “look of pure detachment” (24).While observing Connie, he “was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made” (24).And like a panoptic camera, he “saw everything, registered everything” (25).34 Mick not only sees the world through the camera eye; he also wants to be seen through it. The narrator’s detailed depiction of the playwright’s frozen facial expression suggests that Mick is posing for a photograph:“sometimes as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth” (23). The visual and analytical complexity of the description reflects the intellectualized ocularcentrism of both character and narrator. The curiously old narrator of the destructive phase will give


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way to a more playful and rejuvenated narrator as the relationship between Connie and Mellors escalates. The ocularcentric metaphors involving the men are associated with the public domain—theater, advertising, photography, and scientific laboratory—whereas the mirror metaphor involving Connie is related to the private realm of the bedroom. This difference suggests that she has greater access to the interior life, even though her awareness is also becoming increasingly specular. The men’s vision metaphors are also more active and invasive. The narrator’s representations of the three sex scenes involving Connie and Mick make use of ocularcentric and logocentric devices that highlight the splits not only in the characters but also in the narrator.The narrator exploits the satiric potential of the psychonarrative technique and injects scathing comments about the characters’ consciousness, but these comments belie a split consciousness similar to the ones under attack. Moreover, the narrator’s attacks on figural consciousness are implicitly assaults on the reader’s consciousness. It is as if the narrator takes a hammer to the reader’s already-cracked mirror-mind in order to shatter it to pieces. In effect, the narrator tries to hasten the mind’s own slow self-splintering process.The first two sex scenes occur in Chapter III, and the last is set in Chapter V.They are meant to be samples of modern sexuality and to leave readers as bored, irritated, angry, and shattered as the characters are. Michaelis does not appear in the novel’s first two versions. While writing the final version, Lawrence must have decided it was essential to contrast Connie’s fulfilling erotic relationship with Mellors to an unsatisfying affair with a “modern lover” like Mick.The playwright is a kind of unparalyzed Clifford who gives readers a glimpse of what Connie’s marital life might have been like if Clifford had not been physically injured. We have already seen that the two men have highly similar modes of knowing and relating.The failure of Connie’s affair with Mick thus suggests that her marriage to Clifford would have failed even if he had not been paralyzed. The narration of the foreplay to the first intercourse stresses Mick’s reflexive, logocentric, and ocularcentric activities. He verbally feigns sympathy for Connie’s aloneness (“ ‘Aren’t you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?’ ”) and then extorts a sexual response from her womb with his gaze (“fixing his eyes on her . . . and sending out an appeal that affected her direct in her womb”); finally, he forces a tactile connection that is more maternal than romantic when he kneels beside her and buries his face in her lap (“the infant in the night was crying out of his

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breast to her”) (25–6). Conversation, gaze, and embrace all evidence ruptures: the verbal split of irony; the visual divide between coercer and coerced; and the tactile imbalance between mother and child. Mick’s actions shift from verbal to visual to tactile, much as Connie’s youthful affairs were initiated by talk. The narrator’s description of the first intercourse focuses on Mick, but the perspective blends the points of view of narrator and playwright.This perspective is detached, vague, overpunctuated, synoptic. It conveys the encounter’s brevity, disembodiedness, disconnectedness. The entire exchange is represented in a single-sentence paragraph—a sentence without a mate, as if Mick were sentenced not to be Connie’s future mate: “He was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of every sound outside” (26). Narrative action is reduced to static description: Mick’s coital activity is represented as a state, the stative replacing a strong action verb.The sole movement directly rendered is his trembling body. He is incapable of complete immersion in the moment: his attention is divided between Connie and external sounds.The superfluity of “at the same time” calls attention to his excessive timeconsciousness. It is a dualistic form of simultaneity that does not lead to the sense of living beyond time.The word “curious” subliminally suggests his and the narrator’s intellectual detachment.35 When the perspective briefly shifts to Connie, the narrator reveals that the intercourse “meant nothing” to Connie “except that she gave herself to him” (26). She gave but did not receive; it is not a reciprocal, mutually satisfying relationship. Significantly, the psychonarration emphasizes her semantic response (“meant nothing”) rather than her feelings. Throughout the mortification phase, the dominant verbs of consciousness involve thinking, talking, or seeing. In the erotic episodes with Mellors, verbs referring to feeling and touch predominate. In describing the second intercourse, the narrator offers another external, nonnuanced account with little attention to figural feelings. The focus begins with Mick’s action and then shifts to Connie’s reaction.The seriality rather than simultaneity of their behavior reflects the linear, time-bound, cause-effect logic of modern sexual behavior. A single paragraph portrays this brief activity in flat, analytical language: He was the trembling, excited sort of lover, whose crisis soon came, and was finished. There was something curiously childlike and defenceless about his naked body: as children are naked. His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of


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cunning, and when these were in abeyance, he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow, struggling helplessly. (29) The summarizing quality of “He was a trembling sort of lover” reduces Mick to a mere type.The passive voice (“whose crisis . . . was finished”) reflects what in a subsequent paragraph will be called Mick’s “erect passivity” (29). Only the first sentence narrates his sexual activity, and the sense of motion is mitigated by the omission of details and by beginning with the stative (“He was the . . . sort of lover”). The second sentence comments on an aspect of the first: his body is childlike and defenseless. And the third sentence comments on an aspect of the second: his defenses are his wit and cunning. Thus, the three sentences create a recursive structure, from quasi-action to analysis to meta-analysis. In effect, the narrator uses psychological commentary to progressively dissect Mick’s sexual body. Dorrit Cohn has shown that Thomas Mann often uses psychological commentary in his psychonarrations to create dissonance between narrator and character, whereas James Joyce minimizes explicit narratorial comment and instead relies on narratorial style to remark implicitly on figural consciousness.36 Lawrence’s narrator creates both dissonance and consonance through his psychological commentary: his assault on the playwright creates a sense of conflict and at the same time indicates he shares Mick’s attacking mind.The narrator’s overly heady analysis combats Mick’s head-centered “defenses”: wit and cunning are what Nietzsche might call the “reactive” strengths of the weak. Lawrence is suggesting that the reader’s intellectual defenses must be dissolved if transformation is to take place.The protracted analysis of Mick’s defenses in comparison with the foreshortened description of his sexual performance indicates that his minimal erotic activity is compensated by excessive mental reactivity. His premature finish is clearly related to his “unfinished, tender flesh,” and his halting performance is suggested by an overpunctuated first sentence: there is an unnecessary comma in “whose crisis soon came, and was finished.” The promiscuous overpunctuation in the novel’s early chapters implies that words, like the people who use them, do not fully connect because they are separated and diminished by superfluous conventions. Michael Squires argues that “child,” “defense,” and “naked” are the “pivotal words” around which this passage exfoliates. He calls this narrative device Lawrence’s “loop method” since the narrator “uses significant words as a springboard to additional details . . . then rounds back to these words to achieve clarity and coherence” (155). The strengths of this

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method include, according to Squires,“its capacity to thicken Lawrence’s prose and to enclose the reader in a felt sense of order”; the weaknesses involve its contribution to the novel’s “hardened characterizations, . . . strident tone, and . . . schematic nature” (168). What Squires does not notice is how the different features of this technique are used to produce the novel’s intended effects. I am arguing that Lawrence capitalizes on the hard and strident features in the mortifying scenes and on the thickening and emotive features in the vivifying ones. In this passage, the repetition of pivotal words is intentionally annoying. They are verbal battering rams.The mechanical repetition is as abrasive as the belabored analysis. When the narrator shifts the focus to Connie’s reaction, the perspective is more subjective, but the language is still abstract and explanatory. And Connie’s moment to moment experience is not reported. Instead, readers are told of her “dazed, disappointed” state after intercourse (29). Masculinist sexuality elides female subjectivity. The third and final coupling between Connie and Mick occurs at the end of Chapter V.This location is significant: the act of intercourse takes place soon after the introduction of Mellors to Connie—and to the reader—in the first part of Chapter V.With this introduction, Lawrence begins his attempt to rejuvenate the reader’s consciousness. The narration of the third intercourse is a small-scale repetition—a mini-parody—of the second. The miniaturization intensifies the previous sense of the brevity and emotional insignificance of their liaisons. The episode is deflated not only by sarcasm but also by the mechanical repetition of words from earlier scenes: “excited,” “naked,” “come,” “finished,” “craving,” “crisis,” “wild” (53). None of these words are put into new relations with other words but are instead repeated in drearily similar, though more condensed, semantic contexts. They are organized by the mechanical law of the paternal logos, not by the semiotic, spontaneous play of what Julia Kristeva calls the maternal chora.37 For example,“He was the trembling excited sort of lover” in the second sexual encounter becomes “He was a more excited lover”; and “wild, craving physical desire” becomes “a certain craving passion.” Mechanical action and time consciousness are also implied by the participants’ serial actions: Mick finishes his activity and then Connie begins hers, just as they did during the second coupling. The repetition of action and miniaturization of scenes emphasize that the relationship deteriorates because there is no new influx of sacred energy to make it grow. The lack of orgasmic simultaneity is what causes Michaelis to explode verbally. The very strength of his verbal explosion contrasts with the weakness of his orgasm.The contrast shows how much of his vital energy


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has been concentrated in his head, at the expense of the rest of his body. The explosion is small in duration but scathing in effect:“When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:‘You couldn’t go off at the same time as a man, could you? You’d have to bring yourself off! You’d have to run the show!’ ” (53). Like other scopophilic males, Mick punishes the woman for arousing his castration anxiety.38 His reference to the intercourse as a “show” underscores his own detachment and explains his stage fright. He clearly has dodged his own responsibility and put the blame for their sexual failure on her. “Show” also echoes Dukes’s reference to “the mental life” as “the rotten old show” (37). From this episode, readers learn that the consequences of inadequate sensuality are not merely ennui, frustration or irritation; rather, erotic incompetence and dissatisfaction can create emotional turmoil, which in turn can trigger verbal vehemence. Mick’s “unexpected piece of brutality” proves to be the last blow of the critical consciousness against Connie’s own investment in “[t]he mental life” (54). His speech “killed something in her,” and her “whole sexual feeling” for him and for “any man” collapses that night (54). That is, her libidinal investment in modern sex has been unconsciously withdrawn. Her erotic feeling is now fully mortified. The scene closes with her—and the reader— wondering if there is a way out of the nihilism of modern living. Still unconscious of Mellors’s influence and of the potential for a shared future with him, Connie considers a Stoic attitude:“To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living” (55). William James, an important influence on Lawrence, had described Stoicism as one of the highest moral–emotional attitudes that can be adopted short of full religious conviction based on conversion.39 Many modernist texts would have ended here: on a note of negation.40 But for Lawrence, negation is only one phase of the “double rhythm” of art. He intends that Connie and the reader be revitalized—twice-born. Finally, head-centered techniques are used in Chapter IV to structure the two conversations about sex by Clifford and his Cambridge comrades. In the first discussion, when the characters talk about how they see sex as talk, they enact a recursive structure of talking about talk. Moreover, since the narrator has already described the sisters’ textualization of sex, the arguments implicitly reflect upon the earlier psychonarrations.Thus, during the disintegration phase, the novel itself is split and recursive, enacting the narrator’s divided consciousness. Moreover, the argumentative form itself creates combatants in an abrasive contest, not participants in a connective exchange. Their verbal activity is governed by a frictional, mechanical logic, the very logic that structures their sexual

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interactions. Their frictional energy is intended to abrade the reader’s conventional consciousness. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, the second version of Lady Chatterley, this energy is described as “the frictional, seething, resistant, explosive, blind sort, like that of steam-engines and motor-cars and electricity and of people such as Clifford” (The First and Second Lady 371).41 The second discussion involves a meta-analysis of the first one, thereby adding another recursive layer. In particular, the discussants reflect on the spite they had displayed earlier. Dukes begins the reflective process by commenting that “the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite” (36). Sexual repression produces both physical and verbal aggression. One of Dukes’s main roles in this conversation is to reflect upon the strengths and limitations of critical self-consciousness. He reveals the purgative value of criticism—its positive function as negation:“My God, the world needs criticising today—criticising to death.Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show” (37). Dukes provides the reader with the rationale for the structure and content of the novel’s mortification rhythm: the corrosive techniques are intended to strip the reader’s old ways of knowing and relating. Readers are meant to experience these conversations as Connie does: “it was a little irritating” (35).Through irritation, the narrator tries to rub out the reader’s restrictive identification with “the mental life.” In Chapter VI, in the episode where Connie’s womb has a vision of Mellors bathing, the reader will encounter a brief deployment of vitalizing devices and discourses. From this scene onward, the novel will then shift its emphasis to the positive transformation of Connie and the reader.To do this, a new type of narrator or narratorial consciousness is needed: one capable of suggesting the nondual organismic awareness of the characters and of evoking a similar awareness in the reader.The creation of this new type of narration is the impossible task Lawrence attempted. It required that he use language to move the reader beyond language. It required a body-centered narration capable of touching the reader’s somatic awareness.The purgation phase is not over, will never be fully over, for Lawrence knows the reader’s dualistic thinking and dissociated sexual actions are recalcitrant habits.42 The attacks on the reader’s consciousness continue as Mellors derides modern civilization, and the narrator ridicules Connie’s resistant, satiric mind. But Lawrence’s attempt to revitalize the reader has begun.

CHAPTER TWO

The Revitalization Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

We saw that in the mortification phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the narrator uses head-centered techniques to try to dismantle and purge the reader’s modern sexual consciousness. Splits in the reader’s mind are intensified in order to disintegrate them. In the novel’s sacralization phase, which begins with the introduction of Mellors in Chapter V and reaches its highest pitch in the seven sex scenes involving Mellors and Connie in Chapters X–XVI, the aim is to reintegrate and reenergize the reader’s consciousness. The famous sex scenes have been celebrated for their beauty, verity, and liberating power; they have also been attacked as tedious, naive, sexist, and obscene. While it has been observed that the scenes represent the erotic initiation of Constance Chatterley, what has not been realized is that they are part of a narrative structure designed to initiate the reader.1 The aim of this initiation is to transform the reader.Through an analysis of the literary devices and sacred discourses deployed in the erotic episodes, I demonstrate that Lawrence’s carefully orchestrated effort to revitalize readers eventually gives way to a deconstructive impulse that prevents readers from forming new erotic dogmas and encourages first-hand exploration. The narrator of Lady Chatterley implies that the novel has a vivifying function when he asserts that the “properly handled” novel should “reveal the most secret places of life” by “cleansing and freshening” the “tide of sensitive awareness” (101).While the disintegration phase dominated the first half of the novel, the vitalization phase governs the second half.As one stage wanes, the other waxes.

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In the revitalization phase, Lawrence employs a new narratorial consciousness that becomes progressively integrative, sensory-affective, and poetic as the relationship unfolds. This consciousness represents either a new or transformed narrator and serves as the primary vehicle for initiating the reader. In effect, the new narrator is a kind of hierophant who conducts the transformational process.The vivification stage aims to instill ideas of sacred eroticism and evoke an experience of aliveness and connectedness—a deeply felt response rooted in the reader’s body and realized in his or her mind.2 What is especially remarkable about this phase is that it eventually self-deconstructs: the last four sex scenes partially undermine the reader’s initiation and reflect Lawrence’s desire to avoid engendering a rigid, authoritarian, or sanctimonious religion of eros. The conceptual and affective aims of the vivification phase are intertwined, since Lawrence thought that new ideas emerge from freshly felt experiences. The central conceptual aim is to offer a specific, concrete account of the forms and activities of the erotic body engaged in a dynamic, unselfconscious encounter. To fulfill this basically verbal end, the narrator deploys and attempts to revitalize a vocabulary consisting of terms associated with the growth, responsiveness, organs, reproduction, vulnerability, and vitality of organic life. Special emphasis is given to words associated with the flow and manifestations of life energy. Even dynamic inorganic phenomena—water, fire, earth, air—are assigned sacred value since they are considered by many religious traditions to be the basic elements from which the living universe is composed. The narrator seeks to transvalue the discourse of natural phenomena by infusing the words with numinous meanings and emotions. The chief affective aim of the vitalization phase is to offer readers a vicarious felt experience of the erotic unions that begin in Chapter X. Lawrence wants to give the reader an affective experience of the body, rather than simply an emotional experience of the mind.This experience would have to be a unitive one grounded in the reader’s bodily consciousness and producing a sense of wonder, awe, vitality, relatedness.3 Lawrence did not want his novel to be pornographic—that is, to produce a head-centered experience of sexual intercourse. And he certainly did not want readers to masturbate while reading. His relational view of sex, and his esteem for life energy, prohibited erotic self-pleasuring.4 The novel’s sacred discourses and vivification devices would have to act on the reader’s whole body, not specifically on the genitals.The explicit descriptions of foreplay unabashedly establish the sexual context and offer an unobstructed view of the body, but the coital acts themselves are represented by elemental and organic figures—which is a main difference from

The Sacralization Phase

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pornographic literature.5 But this figuralization is simultaneously a literalization because Lawrence wants readers to realize that the impassioned body is at the deepest levels a moving, living flame of fire, or pool of water.6 To offer Connie’s personal “head” experience of the couplings would be, in Lawrence’s view, to offer a modern and pornographic account. Instead of emphasizing the external movements and personal experience of sex, Lawrence stresses internal, energetic, somatic movements. While Lawrence certainly believed that male and female readers would have different responses to the novel’s sex scenes, he surely also thought that his representations of erotic surrender, arousal, rhythm, exchange, friction, intensification, and climax could have comparable energizing effects for both men and women.7 Moreover, the scenes are constructed with dynamic elemental figures (flames, waves, sap, lava, whirlpools) that are likely to affect male and female readers in somewhat similar ways. The vitalization phase is built around ten nodal erotic scenes: the introduction of Mellors (Chapter V); Connie’s womb vision of Mellors’s bathing himself (Chapter VI); the seven sexual encounters between Connie and Mellors in or near the wood in the spring and summer (Chapters X–XVI); and the eighth and final sexual episode in London (Chapter XVIII). Chapter X is the narrative center of the 19-page novel, and depicts Connie’s first pivotal transformation: her experience of “another self . . . alive in her” (135). The serial order and individual structure of these ten scenes reveal an initiatory design.The introduction of Mellors presents the sacred organic vocabulary and establishes Mellors as a vital figure. The womb vision conveys to readers the possibility of bodily consciousness and solidifies the sense of Mellors’s vitality, which qualifies him as a participant in an erotic initiation. This scene also establishes Connie’s dynamic, sentient body as the primary focalization through which the reader’s consciousness will vicariously undergo a conversion.The next eight erotic scenes, which depict thirteen acts of intercourse, are the most crucial episodes in the vitalization phase and are the main subject of my analysis. The first four episodes, which contain seven couplings, involve the progressive deployment of more numerous and more powerful vitalization devices and discourses to depict the experiences of Connie’s body.The progressive increase in number and intensity of these devices is accompanied by a reduction in splintering techniques, for as Connie’s and the reader’s bodily consciousness is slowly awakened, there is less need for extensive and abrasive mental mortification. The next three sex scenes, which

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comprise five unions, break the mood of religious mystery and grandeur developed in the previous scenes and in effect deconstruct any tendency on the reader’s part to overvalue the particular experiences or the language in which they are represented.The initial encounters were meant to vivify Connie and the reader, but they are not to be idolized. If they produced their intended enlivening effect, that effect is now part of the reader’s past experience.These scenes introduce a variety of erotic actions and feelings in order to convey to readers the sense that the numinous realm can be experienced in numerous ways once nondual awareness has been achieved through initiation. Moreover, the scenes eschew complex literary devices in order to underscore the representational and incantatory limits of language.The eighth scene, which contains the thirteenth and final erotic coupling, offers a psychonarration of Mellors’s experience. The revelation of his anxious self-consciousness destabilizes the impression that he is an infallible initiator of Connie or the reader. His insecurity and fallibility indicate to readers that the relationship is the real initiator. Both characters are initiated by and through the relationship. For the reader, the initiator is the new narratorial consciousness.8 In Chapter V, the reader is introduced to the sacred organic vocabulary through the narrator’s depiction of Mellors’s first meeting with Connie. By this point in the novel, Connie’s focalization is primary, so her experience of Mellors can be expected to have vicarious effects for the reader. She has already experienced the cold, tedious men’s arguments and is already convinced of Mick’s “hopelessness” (29) and of Clifford’s mental commitment to a “steadily-lived life” (45). It is appropriate that the vivification phase should begin with Mellors’s introduction because at this point he is, despite his many flaws, the most vital character in the novel. His Lawrentian ideas, native vitality, woodland home, and rural occupation make him so.This aliveness, coupled with his unconventionality and singularity, qualifies him as a novitiate in Lawrence’s religion of passion. I call Mellors a novitiate and not an initiate or hierophant because he and Connie are joint participants in a mutually transformative relationship.The relationship itself is the initiator.9 Mellors’s qualification for participation in the initiation depends on the sustained growth of his vitality, which itself depends on his ability to maintain close ties with the creatures of the wood and, more importantly, to deepen his bond with Connie. He is badly in need of revitalization both at the beginning and at the end of the narrative. The development of his relationship with Connie transforms him as much as it does her. One might even argue that at the end of the novel she is the stronger, more confident, and more vital character.


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The passage presenting Mellors’s entrance is crafted to convey his vitality to readers and to introduce various terms that will slowly be sacralized through their association with vigorous life forms and activities. The narrator uses metonymy, common adjectives and verbs, and plural pronouns to link Mellors to his lively dog.The intended effect is to subliminally associate the dog’s aliveness with Mellors’s animal energy: She was watching a brown spaniel that had run out of a side-path, and was looking toward them with lifted nose, making a soft, fluffy bark.A man with a gun strode swiftly, softly out after the dog, facing their way as if about to attack them; then stopped instead, saluted, and was turning down hill. It was only the new gamekeeper, but he had frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift menace.That was how she had seen him, like the sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere. (46) In the first sentence, Mellors is introduced prospectively and metonymically by the appearance of his everpresent spaniel.The dog is represented as a vital creature: active (“running out”) and alert (“looking toward them,” “lifted nose”). Mellors’s own dynamism and alertness will be stressed throughout the novel. As the narrative proceeds, readers will discover that the spaniel almost continuously accompanies Mellors; this constant companionship intensifies the subliminal associations between their living energies. The tight connection between man and dog is reinforced in the second sentence by the coupling of their actions with a single verb and the plural pronoun (“facing their way”). Master and dog are also linked by the common adjective “soft”: the dog’s “soft, fluffy bark” and Mellors’s striding “swiftly, softly.” The novel will consistently associate softness with the vulnerability of life. For both dog and master, softness is coupled with force: the force of the dog’s barking energy and of Mellors’s swift stride.Thus, both have that paradoxical combination of force and gentleness, a sign of their sacred vitality.10 Throughout Lady Chatterley, Mellors is linked, metonymically and metaphorically, to a variety of organic phenomena in order to establish a connection between human and nonhuman vitality and to energize the reader’s response to him. For example, when he is bathing, he is compared to “a weasel playing with water”; when he runs after and catches Connie “he took her . . . like an animal”; and just before he weds John Thomas to Lady Jane,“he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body” (66, 222, 228). The continued use of organic images and figures creates

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the impression that he undergoes metamorphoses like those experienced by the characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.The very profusion of organic images applied to Mellors has the net effect of producing imagistic confusion in readers’ minds and of blocking their ocularcentric consciousness. That is, as the visual elements of the organic images collide, coalesce, and in effect cancel one another, readers come to associate Mellors with the common life energy that animates all those images.11 The first four sex scenes, which cover seven couplings distributed throughout Chapters X and XII, are the most critical for initiating the reader.Their aim is to integrate and energize the reader’s consciousness and produce a nondual awareness in which subject and object seem to merge.Thus, as Connie and Mellors seem to coalesce, so too is the reader made to identify more and more closely and intensively with their vivid, unifying experience.As Connie responds with awe or wonder to the elemental quality of the interchange, so too is the reader expected to respond with like feelings to the rhythmic language containing dynamic elemental images. Even the scenes preceding Connie’s sacred encounters with Mellors are designed to energize the reader. Most of the frame scenes depict Connie’s emotional or physical contact with the creatures of the wood. These scenes prepare readers by putting them in the kind of receptive mood they might have when in nature. Some of the charged diction in these frame scenes is used in subsequent erotic episodes. The carrying over of feeling from frame to main scene is usually assisted by the narrator describing a sympathetic connection between Connie and her natural surrounding. Moreover, her erotic development is implicitly linked to the growth of the wood’s organic life. She and the trees are linked by their common sentience and inwardness: “From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees” (65). Lawrence always emphasized that being connected to the living universe means experiencing the rhythms of decay and growth in the natural environment and being synchronized with those same rhythms in the body.12 A main narratorial task of the sacralization phase is the coupling of rhythms: of Connie’s, the wood’s, Mellors’s, the text’s, and the reader’s. In the frame scene preceding Connie’s first coitus with Mellors, the narrator stresses her identification with nonhuman nature—with two hens and their chicks.At first, there is a disparity between Connie’s sense of forlornness and barrenness and the hens’ connectedness and fecundity, but eventually the hens become “the only things in the world that


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warmed her heart” (113). Some of the vital words used to describe the brooding hens and perky chicks will appear in descriptions of subsequent couplings: warm, deep, blood, alive, ecstasy, life, new, pure, proud, fearless (113–5). When representing the foreplay to the first coupling, the narrator uses bodily focalizations for the first time. In this and subsequent erotic scenes, the concept of character shifts: from a self constituted by personal and social qualities and acquirements (what could be called personality, persona or ego) to a self founded on bodily, impersonal forces and responses (what could be called the conscious body, the embodied soul, or the unconscious).13 The characters are not so much the persons named Connie and Mellors as their impassioned bodies. Hands and genitals are central because they are the body’s principal agents of touch and connection.These somatic characters do not have the fixed angle of vision of stock or flat characters, nor the changing scope and depth of vision of characters in realist fiction. Instead, the focalizations are primarily tactile and dynamic: the narrator registers surface changes in texture and warmth of the lovers’ bodies, as well as deeper changes in pleasure and energy flow. These new focalizations seem to bridge traditional perspectival distinctions between subjective and objective, superficial and deep, internal and external, singular and multiple.14 Meditators who contemplate their bodily feelings and sensations have a similar sense of overcoming dualistic consciousness. It is no accident that Mellors refers to the Buddha’s emphasis on “awareness” (277). In the vivification phase, the plot line focuses on the sequence of exchanges among the somatic characters. The exchanges generally begin as immanent experiences of divinity and culminate in transcendental experience. In the immanent experience, theos is experienced as in (infusing, suffusing) the phenomenal world; in the transcendental experience, deus is experienced as beyond this world.15 Immanent moments are associated with passionate contact leading up to orgasm; transcendental moments are associated with orgasmic or post-orgasmic oblivion. Both types of encounters occur in the Now, the present moment. The need to represent intense bodily rhythms and numinous energetic changes as they occur eliminates anachronisms—retrospections and prospections—and requires the frequent use of concrete, figural and symbolic language and of repetitive and antithetical structures. Concrete language is needed to represent the particularities of bodily response while figural and symbolic language is required to signify the invisible energies associated with those responses. The paradoxical structure of the sacred requires the use of figures of antithesis. The new themes in this phase are the tenets of Lawrence’s

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vitalistic religion. The religious ideas that Tommy Dukes schematically presented—holistic knowledge, phallic bridge, resurrection of the body, democracy of touch—are fleshed out and articulated by Connie and Mellors.Thus, in order to touch the reader’s emotional body, Lawrence has transformed the conventional narrative categories. The first somatic focalization is that of Mellors’s libido, and the second is that of his hand. His libido is figured as a flame and is represented as a quasi-independent subject possessing its own intention, knowledge, and motion: For suddenly he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins. . . . He fought against it. . . . But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees. . . . And there was something so mute and forlorn in her, compassion flamed in his bowels for her. (115) Mellors’s libidinal flame is depicted as a sentient being. In this scene, its feeling is compassion, its intention is to soothe Connie, and its motions are quick and forceful like a wild animal’s (shooting, leaping, darting, circling). The libido’s action is stronger than, and contrary to, Mellors’s personal will. He has become a kind of burning bush at the mercy of the sacred compassion inflaming him.The narrator transvalues “compassion” by associating it with Mellors’s bowels, instead of with his heart.The narrator offers a more ancient conception of compassion: the Biblical word for compassion (rachamim) derives from the word “womb” (rechem).The libidinal flame finds expression in Mellors’s hand, which then becomes a somatic subject whose focalization is rendered.As a representative of the body’s divine force, the hand possesses its own desire, knowledge, motion, intention, sensation: “He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to the curve of her crouching loins” (116). Mellors’s hand is stressed in the first four sex scenes because he is the initiator of erotic connection.16 Lawrence’s patriarchal logic required active male initiative and reactive female surrender, at least at the beginning of the relationship. Both patriarchal and egalitarian logics are present in the novel. However, the intended effect of the novel’s final mortification phase is to destablize all assertions of rigid hierarchy. Once Connie is “born . . . a woman,” she starts to initiate sexual contact and exploration (187–8). Moreover, regardless of who initiates connection, both Mellors and Connie have to surrender to their relationship. As somatic subject, the hand takes on the linguistic subject position and has a soft, gentle stroking motion that contrasts with the darting, shooting


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motion of the initial erotic impulse. The hand’s blindness enables it to operate without ocular interference. It relies instead on felt awareness. A few paragraphs later, the hand’s desire and knowledge are explicitly acknowledged: “Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her where it wanted” (116). The first two acts of intercourse are still largely dominated by Connie’s resisting ocularcentric consciousness, but her bodily awareness is nevertheless activated for short periods.As a result, only small portions of each episode present her tactile focalizations. In these passages, her skin registers the movements, desire and knowledge of Mellors’s body. For example, during their first coupling, She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she quivered as she felt his hand groping softly. . . . Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched her warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him. (116) The main significance of the first union is that it transvalues the word “peace” by simultaneously sensualizing and sacralizing it.17 Mellors’s sense of “pure peace” is also emphasized in the second union (125).The word “pure” is implicitly transvalued since Christian notions of purity generally exclude the body. Connie’s dreamy, somnolent state during the first sexual coupling indicates that she is partially conscious (116). Even though it is clear that she is not being forced to participate, this semiconscious state is likely to create moral difficulties for the reader and so to generate resistance to reader identification with the initiatory process. Part of the task of the subsequent erotic scenes is to overcome this resistance. In Lawrence’s view, the very muting of Connie’s conscious mind indicates that a deeper, more sacred connection is at work and that her body is knowingly and freely participating.18 Nearly all of the erotic encounters are interpreted, either by the narrator’s comments or by Connie’s reveries or remarks.When Connie’s participation in the coupling is partial, she or the narrator interprets the act as it is happening, usually in a satiric mode. Thus, after her second sexual exchange with Mellors in which she “willed herself into separateness,” the narrator presents her vituperative thoughts:“That thrust of the [Mellors’s] buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous” (126).The partially vital activity is thus represented by an “impure” mix of sacralizing and deconstructive modes.When Connie participates fully in the union, the

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narrator’s explanation is usually delayed until after the encounter is represented. In these cases, vivifying and explanatory discourses are segregated. The exclusion of explanatory discourses serves to heighten and maintain the nonconceptual—that is, affective—effects of the erotic encounter. Connie’s interpretations of sacred exchanges are revealed in reveries as she returns to or resides at Wragby Hall, or are verbalized to Mellors immediately or shortly after the couplings. Thus, as she walks to Wragby Hall after experiencing their third erotic exchange, the narrator reveals her numinous feelings and thoughts:“Connie went slowly home, realising the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her. . . . And with this self she adored him” (135). And back at Wragby, she feels “gone in her own soft rapture” (138). In some instances, Mellors responds to her remarks and either validates or revises her interpretations of the sexual encounters. Thus, after their fourth encounter, he comments on the rarity of simultaneous orgasms and assures her that full involvement is not always necessary: “Well, dunna fret! There’s no law says as tha’s got to.Ta’e ‘t for what it is” (172). The seesawing of mortifying and vivifying elements within and between erotic episodes reflect the “great oscillations” between “the superficial and spiritual consciousness” that occur in the evolution of mystical consciousness (Underhill 178). Connie’s consciousness oscillates between sensual and intellectual, and the reader’s awareness is expected to fluctuate similarly. As Connie and the reader become gradually initiated into sacred eroticism, the mortifying elements wane and the vivifying elements wax. The moments of resistance and recoil are indicated by the reintrusion of the satiric, analytic narrator. In effect, the narrator uses satire to attack Connie’s and readers’ recoil. In general, the mortification techniques are presented more explicitly and pedantically in these scenes, as if Lawrence were anxious to ensure that readers understand what he is trying to do.These devices appear both before and after the sacralizing techniques.Those that come before seek to minimize the reader’s resistance to the ensuing vitalization; those that come after aim to reflect and undermine the reader’s residual resistance. Given the theological significance of the number three, it is not surprising that the third sex episode, which contains the third and fourth couplings, is highly significant. In Apocalypse, Lawrence underscores that the number three signifies sanctity, divinity, balance, integrity, perfection, absolute being (100). He sometimes refers to the Holy Ghost—the Third Person—as “the balancer.”19 The Holy Ghost encompasses mind and body and thus enables the shift from one mode of consciousness to the other. It is what Tommy Dukes calls “the whole corpus of consciousness”


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for it contains “real knowledge . . . out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind” (37). The third union is narrated from Connie’s bodily focalization and centers on her sensual awakening. The principal vitalizing devices are the concretization of earlier concepts and the use of interlocking metaphors and phonic resonances. Mellors’s sexual powers are only recently revived, and either because of anxiety or inactivity, he prematurely ejaculates, but his orgasm is strong enough to precipitate a rippling response in her that culminates in an unconscious orgasm—her first orgasm with him: For a moment he was still, inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite, and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at last. (133) The “points of brilliance” in Connie are not the eyes’ focal point perspective, nor the sun’s brilliant light, but the vital body’s multiple, dynamic points of feeling and inner brilliance.The newness and strangeness of the thrills, coupled with the language of awakening, inform readers that a sacred experience is beginning. Earlier, the newness and strangeness of the wood had been stressed. The rippling thrills in this scene are not the abstract, superficial “sex-thrills” that young Connie “took . . . as a sensation, and remained free” (9); they are particularized, embodied thrills concretely represented as the core of her unfolding bodily experience.The inner rippling suggests her body has become an ocean of life. This ocean metaphor is extended in the next sentence, which repeats “rippling” three times—the trinity suggesting the body’s divinity through the influx of divine, soulmaking energy. In that sentence the ocean metaphor is then linked to a bird simile, which is itself linked to a fire simile: the ocean waves resemble flapping wings, which resemble flames. All the images are moving, as are the repeating words that signify them.20 The passage’s phonic resonances can be expected to have a brief meditative effect on readers.The rhythmic repetition of sacred words, phrases or sounds—as well as the use of highly emotive imagery—is a common meditative procedure.21 Sound repetition can both stymie conceptual thought and stimulate the body’s emotional centers. In this scene the

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repetitions are polyphonic, not monotonous. They include various forms of exact and near repetition: consonance (flapping/flames/feathers, melting/molten, rippling/running), word repetition (rippling, exquisite, and soft are repeated), near rhymes (melting/molten), and phonemic iteration (lapping in flapping/overlapping). As the physical properties of these words reduplicate, paralinguistic units seems to copulate like bodies. One word—“overlapping”—actually describes the process in which it participates.And the “lap” common to “flapping” and “overlapping” has a sexual connotation appropriate to the context: the overlapping of Connie and Mellors occurs in their laps. Moreover,“soft” qualifies flames and feathers, indicating that softness characterizes the evanescence and fragility of inorganic things as much as the vulnerability of living organisms. In short, impermanence characterizes and links all created things.22 Lawrence’s use of multiple metaphors to represent diverse manifestations of divine energy is another way of acknowledging the impermanence of forms: each form expresses a unique but limited aspect of the divine; this form endures for only a period of time; when the form dissolves, a new finite form will be created to manifest a different aspect of the infinite divine force.23 In the depiction of the fourth coitus, the narrator stresses the moment to moment impact of Mellors’s penis on Connie’s bodily focalization. It is the most extensive somatic narration so far and relies on the elaboration of images of widening and deepening circular motions, physical and emotional, within Connie’s body. Her mind is “unconscious in passion,” and the rhythmic phallic action on the oceanic womb produces a deepening spiral of sensations that issue in orgasm: She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped her. And she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring and in strange rhythms flushing up into her, with a strange, rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled her all cleaving consciousness. And then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation, swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling.And she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. (133–4) Unlike Connie’s conscious vaginal gripping of Mick’s penis, this is a spontaneous, unconscious clinging.24 Her cleaving womb experiences his penis as a growing bud, recalling her identification with the trees just before her womb vision (66).The “strange rhythms flushing up” is further


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elaborated as “a strange, rhythmic growing motion,” and “growing motion” is further specified as “swelling and swelling.” The repetition plus elaboration conveys to readers the sensation produced by the exfoliating penis. Biblical narrative uses similar repetition devices to convey heightening or accelerating passion.25 The phallus is implicitly figured as a plunger that turns Connie’s body of water into ever deeper and wider concentric whirlpools of feeling. “Whirl” seems to expand to “swirling,” with the “s . . . ing” rotating around “wirl.”The phrase “fluid of feeling” sacralizes feeling by metaphorically linking it to the influx of divine energy.Thus, feeling is transvalued because of its mediational significance. The sexual relation turns Connie’s passionate body into a purified and purifying body of water—a baptismal pool for her and the reader. The swirling of watery sensations through her tissue also transvalues a Christian analog: the Divine Sea that soaks the mystic’s soul.The sense of divine union is thus translated from the spiritual to the sensual realm. Finally, the rotating images reflect in their form, and highlight in their content, the technique Lawrence identifies, in Apocalypse, as “the old pagan process of rotary image-thought” (95).26 Thus, for Lawrence,“pagan thought” is felt-intuitive thinking based on images.The linking, elaborating and repeating of images is a common visualization technique used by meditators to concentrate attention. The image of the rotating spiral or vortex keeps attention both centered and dynamic: there is circular movement around a stable center at each level of the spiral as well as vertical movement between circular levels. The stillness and unconscious quality of the post-orgasmic period is emphasized, signifying that the sacredness continues as long as the participants are lost to their conscious selves.The sense of the couple temporarily losing their separate identities is conveyed by the use of “they”: “And they lay, and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost” (134). This is the first time the plural pronoun appears in a sex scene and underscores the couple’s simultaneous participation in the unknown.27 Moreover, the creative power of the third and fourth couplings is confirmed for the reader in Connie’s subsequent reverie: she realizes that her sensual union has produced a “burning molten” self (135).28 The fifth, sixth, and seventh acts of coitus occur in the fourth sex scene, depicted in Chapter XII.These conclude the solemn, mysterious, more rigidly ordered phase of the reader’s initiation. In line with the oscillating pattern of surrender and recoil, the fifth intercourse involves a recoil from the fourth coupling, and the language of sarcasm dominates: “her spirit stiffened in resistance . . . her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous” (171).

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The sixth exchange involves an extended water metaphor that encompasses and magnifies a variety of earlier images and rhythms. Connie’s body becomes a rolling ocean whose depths are plunged, plumbed, and disclosed: And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman. (174) The immense, dynamic, sublime image is meant to quicken and extend the reader’s consciousness and stir awe.This image of a dark ocean set in rippling, billowing motion by a massive plunger fuses and expands the earlier images of her body as whirlpool and rippling lava. The ripples enlarge to waves, and the waves move outward concentrically as in a whirlpool. This concentric motion is an elaboration of the “concentric fluid of feeling” described in the fourth act of intercourse (134). Connie’s “consummation” begins in her sensual consciousness (“she knew herself touched”), gives way to unconsciousness and nonbeing (“she was gone”), and resumes in a new state of consciousness and being (“she was born: a woman”) (174).The “consummation” both consumes her old sensual self and completes her womanhood.The colon and space between “born” and “a woman” emphasize the mystery of birth, the fact that it always involves some unknowable addition or influx. Here the addition is Connie’s womanhood. Significantly, her womanhood is born during the sixth coupling, much as Eve and Adam are created on the sixth day. The gap produced by the colon here is positively valued, whereas the ellipsis in the destructive phase is figured negatively.29 The positive gap signifies an open emptiness filled by a divine influx, whereas the negative gaps signify barren, enclosed emptiness.


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In the seventh union, the traditional religious language of negation dominates.The narrator stresses the incomprehension and ineffability of the encounter: “And this time his being within her was . . . such as no consciousness could seize. Her whole self quivered unconscious. . . . She could not know what it was. She could not remember what it had been” (175).The negative language is in keeping with the number seven. Just as the Creator ceased speaking and rested on the seventh day of creation, so too does the narrator refrain from the creative work of inventing positive religious language.30 Despite Connie’s inability to conceptualize or articulate the experience, her body never forgets how it felt—inconceivably “lovely” (188).31 For the feeling body, the past is continuous with the present, since all time resides in the present moment.The presence of the rainbow in this scene—“his being with her was . . . iridescent” (188)— indicates that a symbolic linking of heaven and earth is achieved. Given the momentousness of the seventh coupling, it should not be surprising that in the adjoining scene the word “love” is transvalued by being sensualized. Having achieved sexual womanhood and having explored Mellors’s manhood, Connie murmurs, “My love! my love!” (175). The word seems to flow naturally out of the experience. While Mellors admits his love for her, he adds that he loves her for the experience or relationship she affords him: “I love that I can go into thee . . . that tha opened to me . . . that I came into thee like that” (176). She becomes not so much a sexual object as a participant in a sacred process. Each is to the other an opening into the sacred. Neither is an ultimate end. The sequence of erotic scenes can be understood as an attempt to revivify, and hence resacralize, “the great words” that have lost much of their deep inspirational value for Connie and for readers: “love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words” that are today “half-dead” (62).While the disintegration phase sought to cancel the moribund meanings of these words, the vitalization phase labors to reinvest them with new, dynamic meanings as Connie and Mellors move toward becoming husband and wife, father and mother, and building a home in which joy and happiness have a place. Abstract words do not disappear in this stage; rather, they accumulate new denotations and connotations from the various concrete and vivid linguistic contexts in which they are imbedded. Moreover, words previously dominated by Christian spiritual meanings—like “peace,” “perfection,” “purity,” and “mystery”—are newly invested with sacred sensual senses.32 Having used a fairly rigid—oscillating but progressive—structure to vitalize the reader during the first four sex scenes, the narrator uses the

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next three erotic episodes to dismantle that pattern and present new, more indeterminate patterns.The strict sequencing of devices designed to bring the reader to a conceptual and emotional appreciation of sensuality must now give way to a looser, freer arrangement, because the religious path, in Lawrence’s view, is neither single nor strait nor straight. It moves in cycles, much as the images and emotions move in the novel. With the initial transvaluation of sex completed, Lawrence wants to expose readers to the varieties of sacred eroticism. Sacred sex must not become sanctimonious:“Everything has its hour of ridicule—everything” (Studies in Classic American Literature 73).33 The dismantling of the initial pattern is an important instance of Lawrence including a self-critique in his novels.34 In the “Study of Thomas Hardy,” he emphasizes the need for such a self-critique: “every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But if it be really a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres. . . . The degree to which the system of morality, or the metaphysic of any work is submitted to criticism within the work of art makes the lasting values and satisfaction of that work” (89). In the fifth sex scene, which contains the eighth, ninth, and tenth couplings, the progressive structure is explicitly critiqued by Connie and Mellors. The characters’ analyses of their own erotic encounters constitutes a transvaluation of self-consciousness. Their new critique occurs after, not during, sexual activity, whereas the old, destructive form of self-consciousness had permeated erotic action and so prevented numinous experience.The characters’ assessments of themselves and each other begins when Mellors admits his role in his past erotic failures, proclaims his belief in “fucking with a warm heart,” and then accuses Connie of liking “cold-hearted fucking,” which he condemns as “death and idiocy” (206). Then, he questions her tenderness and criticizes her for wanting sexual intercourse “to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance” (207). Connie counters his charge with a similar criticism: “But that’s what I’d say of you.Your own self-importance is everything to you” (207). Implicitly, they acknowledge and accept each other’s recriminations. In fact, the charge of wanting to make sex grand and mysterious is applicable to Lawrence himself and to his narrator, who has attempted to rejuvenate the reader in the first four sex scenes. The narration of those seven couplings was designed, as I have shown, to convey such grandeur and mystery. Having used a fairly systematic technical organization to stimulate such feelings in the reader, the narrator now creates a third set of focalizations, unlike the intimate, sublime focalizations of the first half of the vitalization


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phase and also unlike the distant, satiric perspectives of the mortification phase. Since the initial vivification has been completed, the narrator can again appeal to the reader’s critical mind, for the ultimate focalization is that of the whole self, not just of the feeling body. Moreover, Lawrence is aware that the novel runs the risk of wallowing in its own selfimportance. Such conceit is an everpresent danger in all religious matters, whether sensual or not.The last three sex scenes deflate the novel’s self-importance by offering a variety of more ordinary yet still valued forms of eroticism. These deconstructive scenes also distance the novel from pornography, which often presents “the sexual breakthrough” as decisive and unproblematic. The narration of the eighth coitus shuns the elaborate, metaphoric, and rhythmic techniques of earlier sex scenes. Its brief and straightforward depiction indicates that good sex is sometimes no more than a soothing experience: “he lay with her and went into her there on the hearthrug, and so they gained a measure of equanimity” (208). The prelude to the ninth and tenth couplings is as important as the intercourses themselves because it displays a dramatic shift in tone, toward the light-hearted. It contains: Connie’s half-uneasy, half-playful comments about Mellors’s phallus; Mellors’s amusing address to his phallus; and his naming of their genitalia “John Thomas” and “Lady Jane” (210).The playful tone again indicates that the earlier pattern of solemn mystery has given way to light conversation and ceremony.The transformed couple can now play like children, and the reader is made privy to their ludic sensuality. The number nine is a trinity of trinities. In keeping with this ineffably holy state, the narration of the ninth union is entirely omitted. It implicitly confesses the verbal incommunicability of the sacred, and retroactively deconstructs all earlier attempts at representing numinous experience. It reminds readers that these verbal representations are simulacra—they should be valued only to the extent that they produce their intended vitalizing effects; they must not be mistaken for the effects themselves, nor should they be considered accurate representations of those experiences.The narrator offers only a brief description of the prelude to and aftermath of the ninth coupling: He was in a hurry now. And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallos [sic]. (210) The intercourse’s incommunicability is represented by the gap between the two one-sentence paragraphs. It is as if an extralinguistic coupling

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took place in the space between the linguistic elements. Sex is absolved from language, instead of being another form of talk, as it was for Clifford’s friends.35 The narration of the tenth coupling is an abbreviated version of earlier acts of intercourse. The narrator merely repeats earlier metaphors rather than continuing to elaborate or link them in new and interesting ways: And she quivered, and her own mind melted out. Sharp soft waves of unspeakable pleasure washed over her as he entered her, and started the curious molten thrilling that spread and spread till she was carried away with the last blind flush of extremity. (211) The cursory, summary quality of the prose is almost reminiscent of Connie’s first intercourse with Mick, but the focus is clearly not external.36 The sixth sex scene, in Chapter XV, contains the eleventh coitus, which is initiated by Connie’s eurhythmic dance and culminates in Mellors’s animal-like coitus (222). The episode emphasizes the playfulaggressive dimension of eroticism—the male animal pursuing and attaining his mate: “Her pointed keen animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. . . . She . . . ran out with a wild little laugh . . . running blurred in the rain with the eurythmic dance-movements . . . he took her, short and sharp and finished, like an animal” (221–2). Since Lawrence used the number seven to symbolize a complete cycle of initiation, and the number twelve to signify “an established cosmos,” one might expect the seventh sex scene, which contains the twelfth union, to represent the final phase (Apocalypse 55). Even the episode’s content—anal intercourse—indicates a culmination, since the anus is near the sacrum, the site of the first bodily center (chakra) of “dynamic consciousness.”37 Moreover, the narrator explains that the anal intercourse constitutes the final transformation of Connie’s body: she is “stripped . . . to the very last” by the “sensual fire” and is “made a different woman” (246–7).This new woman is in touch with “the real bedrock of her nature”—with her “sensual self, naked and unashamed” (247).38 But while the content and numbering of this scene make it the appropriate final initiatory step for Connie and the reader, the form argues against this interpretation. The scene’s abstract, rhetorical discourse does not give readers the feeling that Connie has been liberated by the experience, nor that she has been a full and willing participant.To the contrary, readers may feel that either Connie or the narrator is trying to force a favorable interpretation of her experience.The language repels rather than attracts the reader.39 The scene opens with an abstract,


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summarizing sentence recalling the sex scenes with Michaelis: “It was a night of sensual passion . . .” (246). The passage purportedly represents her experience, but that experience is rendered in highly abstract and definitional terms: “It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality” (246).The static language conveys to readers the frightened response of a partial participant who “almost unwilling . . . let him have his way” (246–7). In subsequent paragraphs,“sensual” and “sensuality” are repeated almost ad nauseam—“the sheer fire of sensuality . . . her sensual self . . . rather awful sensuality. . . . Sheer fiery sensuality” (247)— much as “sex” and “love” had been endlessly reiterated in Chapter 1.40 Connie’s reluctant, partial participation is further confirmed when the reader discovers that Mellors makes her “a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave” (247). The narrator’s insistence that Connie’s experience is purgative and involves a “marvelous death” of her old sensual self is belied by the analytical, rhetorical language. This language conveys the “cost” of letting Mellors have “his way and his will” (247). Moreover, historical comparisons to Abelard and Heloise and to figures on Greek vases indicate that her consciousness is intellectual, not bodybased.41 Her discussion of Abelard and Heloise is instructive to the extent that it indirectly informs readers that she and Mellors have gone through “all the stages and refinements of passion” (247). But the intrusion of insistent, self-conscious and learned language indicates that Connie— and readers—are not ready to be completely unselfconscious about anal sex, and that it will take a long time before taboos and inhibitions are loosened. It is a welcome note of psychological reality in a story that sometimes unfolds too neatly according to plan.42 Another sobering note is sounded in the thirteenth and final coupling, which occurs in Chapter XVIII. It breaks radically from the preceding seven sex episodes by offering mainly Mellors’s focalization. What it reveals further deconstructs those episodes, since Mellors is shown to be a man caught in his own head-centered anxieties.The coupling occurs in his rented attic room in London shortly after Connie has returned from Venice. It is the only coitus to occur in an urban environment. Mellors is feeling beleaguered because of the separation and the scandalous rumors. He also worries about his masculinity and occupation.Though Connie praises “the courage of your own tenderness” (277), and thereby helps him articulate his individuality and self-worth, his anxieties remain.The psychonarration of the subsequent act of intercourse suggests that he is a man trying to convince himself of the value of his self, lover, and relationship. His partial, unconfident participation unsettles readers’ assumption that he had been fully involved in the earlier unions. It also

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makes clear that he is a novitiate, not an initiator; he, as much as Connie, must learn from the relationship.As he makes love, insistent words fill his mind:“I stand for the touch of bodily awareness. . . . And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine. . . . And she will stand behind me. . . . Thank God I’ve got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me” (279). Earlier, he had expressed doubts and fears but seemed to be immersed in the sexual intercourses; now, an element of doubt retroactively infects the reader’s responses to those scenes. Thus, Lawrence, after submitting the reader’s consciousness to an elaborate initiation process, concludes his novel on a note of uncertainty. Even Mellors’s final letter expresses unsureness that his relationship with Connie can be sustained. Despite Lawrence’s deep and sometimes dogmatic religious convictions, he did not want his works to become authoritative on sacred matters.As early as the “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1914), he stressed the need to criticize his own moral and philosophical positions within his works:“The degree to which the system of morality, or the metaphysic, of any work of art is submitted to criticism within the work of art makes the lasting value and satisfaction of that work” (Study of Thomas Hardy 89).The concluding note of doubt in Lady Chatterley’s Lover implicitly tells readers to find out for themselves if unselfconscious sex is indeed as life-enhancing as the novel suggests. Lawrence would have agreed with the Buddha’s advice that the best guide is one’s own experience: “Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books. . . . Be lamps unto yourselves.”43

CHAPTER THREE

Transformative Uses of Kabbalistic Concepts and Terms in The Rainbow

I. Lawrence and Kabbalah A version of the initiatory pattern that we detected in Lady Chatterley’s Lover first appears in The Rainbow, which Lawrence began writing in 1913 and completed in 1915.1 This should not be surprising because Lawrence was reading anthropological and Theosophical writings about initiation rites as early as 1908.2 But the initiatory pattern in The Rainbow is different from that found in subsequent novels in at least two important ways. First, the sacralization–destruction pattern is repeated four times: once in the portrayal of the anonymous premodern Brangwen generations, and again in the depictions of each of the three named, and progressively more modern, generations: those of Tom and Lydia, Anna and Will, and Ursula and Anton. Second and more importantly, the pattern is reversed, with the vitalization phase appearing first and gradually giving way to a disintegrative phase.Thus, as readers proceed through the novel, they experience a fourfold rhythm of rising and falling energy and of integrated and splintered forms of awareness. Moreover, in the representations of the early generations, the vitalization stages are longer and stronger than the destruction phases, whereas in the depictions of the later generations, the reverse is true.Thus, as readers proceed, the sense of rising and integrating diminishes, and the sense of falling and splintering increases. The Fall is for Lawrence a fall from a boundless feeling of connection with the universe to a constricted state of self-consciousness and isolation; the world is no longer experienced with one’s “whole being” but rather with the ego, the seat of reflexive thought.This sense of

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falling-disintegrating, which occurs both within and between generations, conveys the experience of the gradual emergence of the modern split subjectivity.3 Thus, the reversal of the phases has the double aim of transforming the reader’s subjectivity and offering a felt sense of the devolution of European consciousness.4 It might be objected that the reversal of phases disqualifies the form as that of an initiation rite, but this objection can be overcome if we realize that the practice of mortification often follows an initial mystical illumination. In her discussion of the lives of Christian mystics, Evelyn Underhill says that the first stage of spiritual development is usually characterized by a brief experience of illumination, which then motivates the would-be mystic to engage in the second stage, that of self-purification.5 Thus, in The Rainbow, Lawrence first tries to evoke an initial sacred response in the reader and then attempts to remove obstacles to the further expansion of consciousness. It was probably his disillusioning experience of European relations in the years immediately before, during and after World War I that led him to begin subsequent novels with a strong destructive phase.6 Evidently, he had concluded that the constrictive and defensive structures of the European mind needed to be shattered before positive transformation would be possible. In “The Crown,” which he began writing in spring 1915, at the same time that he was revising The Rainbow, he refers to “our whole civilization” as “like a great rind full of corruption, of breaking down . . . a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself ” (Reflections on the Death 277). From Women in Love onward, Lawrence begins his novels by trying to dissolve his readers’ own culturally constructed “shells.” In my analysis of the two phases, I focus on Lawrence’s deployment of Kabbalistic concepts and terms. An understanding of the Jewish esoteric tradition not only clarifies Lawrence’s initiatory intent but also illuminates passages deemed opaque. Kabbalistic literature, which Lawrence may have encountered as early as 1908 in the writings of the Theosophists, offers esoteric interpretations of the Bible as well as techniques for mystical and magical practice. Lawrence’s deployment of Biblical language often is guided by a Kabbalistic perspective. An explication of Kabbalistic concepts and terms expands the range of symbolic meanings of the Biblical references. I show that each vitalization phase in The Rainbow is replete with Kabbalistic mystical concepts and resonances, while each destruction phase is dominated by magical terms.7 The mysticism-magic distinction is important because Lawrence associated mysticism with an unselfconscious, receptive, unitive experience while he identified magic with selfish, manipulative, knowledge-driven

Uses of Kabbalistic Concepts and Terms

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action. Lawrence found Jewish mysticism an attractive source of symbols because it draws on Biblical language familiar to his readers, uses this language in startlingly strange ways, is more body-centered than traditional Christian discourse, and offers a full set of eroticized symbols anchored in a pantheistic or panentheistic conception of the world.8 The main source of Lawrence’s understanding of Kabbalah are the Theosophists Helen Blavatsky and Annie Besant.9 The Theosophists credit the Kabbalah as possessing many of the tenets and symbols of the allegedly universal “secret doctrine” or “ancient wisdom.” Lawrence may have also had some exposure to Kabbalistic ideas from members of the Golden Dawn Society in London, including A. E.Waite and founder S. L. MacGregor Mathers (a Rosicrucian); both men translated several Kabbalistic works.10 Christian and Hermetic Kabbalists often read Christian meanings into their Jewish mystical sources, and sometimes they present flawed accounts of Kabbalistic texts, ideas, and symbols. A. E.Waite, for example, incorrectly asserts that Kabbalah is not pantheistic: while granting that there is “no separation between God, Man and Nature” and that “the mystic communication is permanent,” he nonetheless insists that “the pantheistic doctrine of identity is quite foreign to the real position of Kabbalism” (185). There are a variety of Kabbalistic texts, each with different cosmologies and symbologies, but the most influential text is the Zohar, the Book of Radiance, composed in thirteenth-century Spain by Moses de Leon, but traditionally thought to be authored by its second-century protagonist, the acclaimed teacher and scholar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Its supposedly ancient authorship, together with its vivid metaphors and striking ideas, gave it tremendous religious authority. Like the Kabbalists themselves, the leaders of the Theosophical Society and of the Golden Dawn Society also considered the Zohar the preeminent Kabbalistic text, and it is clear that its ideas, images and symbols had a profound effect on Lawrence. I briefly summarize the principal Kabbalistic concepts, mainly Zoharic, that have a direct bearing on my analysis of The Rainbow. The Zohar’s cosmology inclines toward pantheism: the creation of the universe is conceived as the self-manifestation—the energetic outpouring— of the Godhead.This conception unifies the invisible and visible realms by conceiving the latter as a manifestation of the former; everything is an emanation of the Infinite One (Ein Sof ).The transcendent Infinite One is eternal, still, silent, all encompassing, unkowable; it precedes creation. The immanent God is a Creator God that emerges or emanates out of the transcendent, hidden Godhead.The Creator’s creative powers are figured as a set of polarized and mediating forces known as the “sephirot.”

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In “The Crown,” Lawrence also distinguishes between the transcendent “uncreated” God and the immanent “created” God and asserts that any creature that achieves a “pure relationship, or a consummation out of twoness into oneness” becomes “God created” (Reflections on the Death 303). In the Zohar, the ten sephirot are understood as divine emanations, forces, or attributes and are schematically arranged in seven levels with one or two forces on each level. These seven levels are organized into three vertical columns as indicated in the diagram below: Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5 Level 6 Level 7

Crown Understanding Strength

Wisdom Lovingkindness Beauty

Splendor

Victory Foundation Kingdom/Presence

On the highest level (Level 1) is the Crown (Keter); below the Crown are Wisdom (Chochmah) and Understanding (Binah); below these are Lovingkindness (Chesed) and Strength (Gevurah); below and between these is Beauty (Tipheret); below that are Victory (Netzach) and Splendor (Hod); below and between these is Foundation (Yesod); and below that is Kingdom (Malkhut), also called Presence (Shekhinah).11 The forces on the right (Wisdom, Lovingkindness,Victory) are gendered masculine and receive their general tone from Lovingkindness; the forces on the left (Understanding, Strength, Splendor) are feminine and get their tone from Strength.The forces on the left and right have a yin-yang polarized relation to one another. The forces in the middle (Beauty, Foundation, Kingdom) equilibrate (mediate, balance) the polarized forces above them; the one exception is the Crown, which equilibrates the forces below it. Two of the equilibrating forces are also gendered: Beauty is masculine; Presence is feminine. When an imbalance of masculine and feminine forces occurs, particularly an overabundance of feminine Strength, an evil state (Sitra Achara, the Other Side) is activated. Similarly, in Lawrence’s system, as expressed in “The Crown,” the “supreme sin” is the destruction of the “perfect union in opposition” through the triumph of one divine force over its contrary force (Reflections on the Death 261). The metaphysics of Lawrence’s essay “The Crown” can be understood as a truncated version of the Zoharic scheme. In that early philosophical


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statement, the Crown is called the “keystone” under which the Lion of power and the Unicorn of love exist in a “stable equilibrium by the opposition of the other” (253). Like the Zohar, Lawrence emphasizes the centrality to human life of the polarized forces of power and love (Strength and Lovingkindness). He calls the Crown “the Absolute” that “consummates” and is “beyond” the two “eternities” of love and power; it is the highest manifestation of the immanent “created” God (259). In the Zohar, the Crown is also the highest (and first) manifestation of the immanent God. Lawrence’s metaphysics does not have the many different sephirotic levels, but maintains the masculine and feminine polarities, the equilibrating force, and many of the symbolic associations. In later discursive works like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), he mentions seven levels of forces but focuses on two:“Still remain to be revealed [are] the other great centres of the unconscious.We know four: two pairs. In all there are seven planes.That is, there are six dual centres of spontaneous polarity, and then the final one” (49). He also refers to the seven levels in Apocalypse (1931): “man has seven levels of awareness, deeper and higher: or seven spheres of consciousness” (101). Lawrence must have been particularly intrigued by the Zohar’s inversion of the standard mythic identification of strength with masculinity, and lovingkindness with femininity. In the Zohar, power (Strength) is feminine, and love (Lovingkindness) is masculine. This inversion of typical mythic associations parallels Lawrence’s own experience of his parents: the feminine sensuality of his father, and masculine spirituality of his mother.12 It should be noted that these seven levels also parallel the seven chakras described in Hindu and Buddhist systems.13 Like the Theosophists, Lawrence was interested in identifying correspondences between various ancient spiritual systems. I would argue that the seven levels of consciousnes discussed in Apocalypse simultaneously refer to the seven levels described by both Kabbalists and Yogis, even though some differences do exist between the two systems. In Kabbalah, the arrangement of sephirot is often figured as an upside down Tree of Life.14 Given Lawrence’s love of trees and of organic metaphors, he would have found this arboreal image compelling.The roots correspond to the Crown, which is embedded in the transcendent Infinite One (Ein Sof ) that is above, beyond and behind.The trunk is composed of the middle sephirotic forces, and the branches consist of the forces on the left and on the right.The sephoritic structure is also figured as the body of the Primal Man (Adam Kadmon): Crown, Wisdom, and Understanding form the head region; Lovingkindness and Strength the arms; Beauty the heart and torso;Victory and Splendor the legs; Foundation the phallus.

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The ennobling of the human body—including the sex organs—as an image of divinity would have also been very compelling to Lawrence. According to the Zohar, Primal Adam is the androgynous Adam that exists before Eve is created as a separate being in Genesis 2: 21–2. Blavatsky describes Adam Kadmon as “Father and Mother both”; he is “the archetypal man . . . who in his individuality or unity is yet dual, or bisexual . . . for he is the prototype of all humanity.”15 For Lawrence, Primal Man represents a person whose inner energies are equilibrated and who is in balanced, mutual relationships with others. Lawrence would have been deeply impressed by the Zohar’s sexualization of divinity. Indeed, the Zohar took the gendering of the sephirot to its necessary conclusion: the mystic’s highest aim is to help reunite the masculine and feminine aspects of the divinity, to effect a hierosgamos, a fully erotic divine marriage. This reunion was conceived in explicitly sexual terms. Many Kabbalists believe that when a married man and woman make love with holy intent the divine Presence (Shekhinah) resides between them.16 Moreover, according the principle “as below, so above,” the human act of coitus effects a temporary sexual reunion between feminine Presence and her masculine counterpart, Beauty, and sometimes engenders a human soul. It is the immanent God, not the couple, that creates their offspring’s soul. Similarly, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence emphasizes that while the fertilized egg contains material from the mother and father, it nevertheless contains its “own Holy Ghost,” which is “unique . . . incalculable and intangible”; the “new individual” that is formed is “not a permutation and combination of old elements” but “is something underived and utterly unprecedented, a unique, a new soul” (71). Union with the Presence (Shekhinah) is a main focus of Kabbalistic prayer, meditation and ritual action. At the bottom of the divine Tree of Life, Shekhinah mediates between divinity and humanity. Union with Shekhinah is often ecstatic and represents the first rung of mystical ascension. The achievement of union is sometimes figured as the entry into Pardes, the paradisal Garden of numinous knowledge. Apple Orchard is one of Shekhinah’s names. Of all the divine forces, she is most connected to the flesh and blood of the world. Indeed, she is the living energy and archetype of the cosmos. Shekhinah is a kind of Jewish mother goddess and is identified with the Sabbath Queen and with the seventh day of creation (in Genesis).17 Human evil, symbolized by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, causes her to be separated from her rightful place in the divine unity.18 She is the divine manifestation who accompanies Adam and Eve in their exile from Eden and who will continue to


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accompany Israel until the Messiah brings redemption. As the Presence who protects and guides, Shekhinah is identified with the pillars of cloud and fire that lead the Israelites in the desert.19 She also dwells in the tabernacle in the wilderness and then in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, where she sits upon the throne supported by the two Cherubim facing one another.20 In “The Crown,” Lawrence refers to “the lofty Cherubim that palpitate about the Presence, the Source” (Reflections on the Death 271). As a mediating, equilibrating, protecting, guiding, and inspiring figure, Shechinah is figured as a rainbow. In “The Crown,” Lawrence conflates the Holy Ghost with both Shekhinah (Presence) and the Crown:“the flame of the Holy Ghost: the actual Presence of accomplished oneness, accomplished out of twoness”; “the rainbow, the iridescence which is darkness at once and light, the two-in-one; the crown that binds them both”;“the Crown that belongs only to the consummation” (Reflections on the Death 303, 261, 269). Lawrence’s conflation of Presence and Crown collapses the seven levels of sephirot into two: the level of the conflicting forces (Power versus Love) and the level of the equilibrating force (Crown/Presence/Holy Ghost).21 Although the Zohar does not conflate Crown and Presence, it understands Presence to be the full realization of the Crown.Whereas the Crown is associated with the divine “I will be what I will be,” the Presence is associated with the divine “I” or “I am.”22 In effect, the Presence is the most palpable manifestation of the Crown. II. Mystical Language in the Vitalization Phase In the opening pages of The Rainbow, the sacred encounters of the anonymous, premodern Brangwens are represented in language that sometimes echoes the early passages of Genesis or represents a further sensualization of those passages.23 The Biblical references, mostly to the divine act of creation and to the Garden of Eden, involve mythic events that Lawrence thought symbolize the divine potencies that exist within and beyond the world. Like the Kabbalists, Lawrence often conceived Biblical events as figurations of psycho-spiritual events. For him, as for the Kabbalists, the Garden of Eden symbolizes a sustained state of mystical union with the immanent God. In the novel’s first few pages, references to the Brangwens’ knowing “the intercourse between heaven and earth,” having “ample” resources, living lives “full and surcharged,” and having “senses full fed” indicate that the unnamed generations possess a relatively integrated mode of consciousness grounded in

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sensation and feeling (9–10). Lawrence believed that Adam and Eve experienced this mode of consciousness before they fell into conflicted, self-conscious, and shame-ridden sexuality, and into a sense of separation both from the living environment around them and from the passionate forces within.24 Because the prelapsarian Adam and Eve had their basic bodily needs met, and lived in harmony with the numinous natural surroundings, they experienced a sense of fullness and ampleness. In Genesis 2:9, the newly created Adam experiences the trees as sensually fulfilling: they are “pleasant to the sight, and good for food.” Kabbalists associate Shekhinah with “the fullness” of the earth.25 Lawrence interprets the sense of plenitude and pleasure in prelapsarian Eden as meaning that fulfillment is a natural state of being. Fulfillment is natural because “there is always excess, a brimming over” in nature and because every human being “is a well-head built over a strong, perennial spring” (Study of Thomas Hardy 31–2). The excess in nature is the overflowing divine energy.The premodern Brangwens bestir themselves in action more than in talk and reflection, and their mode of knowing is simultaneously suffused and fused by abundant feeling and sensation.Whelan has identified their mode of consciousness as medieval because the church still has an authentically mystical value for them and because the body is glorified.26 To Lawrence, the medieval consciousness represents a full-bodied awareness of the cosmos. He thought that the rapid growth of visual and verbal culture that began in the Renaissance eventually produced a devaluation of the body and the cosmos.27 In a December 20, 1914 letter, he tells Gordon Campbell that he has had glimpses of the medieval vision:“It is necessary to grasp the Whole.At last I have got it, grasping something of what the mediaeval church tried to express.”28 Lawrence uses several techniques to evoke in the reader a more unified mode of consciousness approximating that of the medieval Brangwens. The most evident device is the striking use of pluralized protagonists. For the first four and a half paragraphs, the protagonist is “the Brangwens”; in the middle of the fifth paragraph it becomes “the men”; and by the sixth paragraph it is “the women” (9–10).The movement from people to men to women is crafted to slowly bring the reader’s awareness to a progressively more differentiated, articulate and self-conscious state of mind, and to produce a sense of rising and falling. In the first few paragraphs, the collective, ungendered treatment of the multiple Brangwen generations not only stresses the relative impersonality and uniformity of their thought and action over time, but also attempts to activate the instinctual,preverbal,generically human dimensions of the reader’s mind.The narrator strives to activate these dimensions by


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occluding sexual distinction and focusing on the collective actions and attitudes of the Brangwen “people” (9).The Brangwens in effect represent a kind of archetypal humanity, like the androgynous Primal Adam, before Eve is split off from his side. Most of the descriptions in the first half dozen paragraphs seem to apply to both Brangwen men and women. None of their characteristics, activities and attitudes— expectancy, freshness, slow speech, sense of ampleness, thrift, farmwork— are explicitly or even tacitly gendered. Moreover, their distinguishing features are represented with very broad strokes:“There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown”; “They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people”; “the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity”;“they had forgotten what it was like to be in straitened circumstances”;“Neither were they thriftless”;“They felt the rush of the sap” (9). The ungendered, plural description is interrupted only once in the opening paragraphs: in the first paragraph, masculine pronouns (“he,”“him”) appear, but they are easily read as gender neutral since they qualify “one”: “Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance” (9). Thus, for four and a half paragraphs, the reader is steeped in the archetypal perspective of a pluralized protagonist. But in the middle of the fifth paragraph, the narrator suddenly introduces sexual difference into the reader’s mind when the pluralized protagonist becomes “men”: The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it.They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. (10) The shift in subject from “the Brangwens” to “the men” causes the reader to wonder whether the entire fifth paragraph describing the farm activities, and perhaps all the preceding paragraphs, are meant to refer only to the Brangwen men.The delay in introducing sexual difference is not meant to suggest that awareness of sexual difference is absent in an integrated consciousness but that such awareness is not self-reflexive. Significantly, the reader’s awareness of sexual difference emerges only in retrospect: actions and attitudes that had seemed gender neutral now appear to be masculine. In this way, Lawrence shows how reflection

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produces a self-conscious sense of difference. The conflation of the gender neutral and the masculine recalls Primal Adam, who is simultaneously androgynous and male.29 It is only in the sixth paragraph that the narrator clearly distinguishes the men and the women: Then the men sat by the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day. (10) This paragraph not only differentiates the sexes but also suggests that the outdoor forms of intercourse described in the previous paragraph mainly, but not exclusively, involve the men. In subsequent Brangwen generations, outdoor interaction will diminish as domestic activities increase, a sign of the growing alienation from the natural environment brought about by modern urbanization, commerce and science.The growth of modern civilization is thus associated with the domestication—the housing and taming—of humankind. The sense of sexual difference is both intensified and blurred in the next paragraph when the reader is explicitly informed of both female difference and similarity: The women were different. On them too was the drowse of the blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercouse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. (10) The difference is one of degree of immersion in the immediate milieu: the men are totally immersed in “exchange and interchange” with “earth and sky and beast and green plants” while the women are only partially absorbed. The women are conscious of and “wanted another form of life” (11).They have a split subjectivity produced by their desire for “the world beyond . . . the far-off world of cities and governments” in which “knowledge” and “the other, magic language” determine who is “the master” (11–12). Lawrence in effect feminizes the desire for civilization and attributes this desire to female disharmony and dissatisfaction with the numinous natural environment, that is, the immanent God. He also implicitly links house and city, domestication and civilization, by


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presenting them as unsatisfying “indoor” alternatives to open air living. In effect, a city is like a big house that insulates its inhabitants from the surrounding wilderness. Lawrence comes close to adopting the Biblical position of blaming women for human conflict. Like Eve, the Brangwen women have a double desire to eat of both the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. In The Symbolic Meaning, Lawrence asserts that the birth of Eve represents the generation of an intellectual consciousness that is capable of self-reflection and hence of split subjectivity: The Eve myth symbolizes the birth of the upper mind, the upper consciousness which, the moment it becomes self-conscious, rebels against the physical being, and is sensible of shame because of its own helpless connection with the passional body.The serpent is the symbol of division in the psyche . . . the divider, which sets spiritual being against sensual being, man against woman, sex against sex, the introducer of the hostile duality into the human psyche. (Studies in Classic American Literature 244) Lawrence’s Eve has fallen out of the harmonious relationship she once had with the divine passion in her body and in nature, while Genesis’s Eve uses her body (by eating the apple) to rebel against God. Once sexual difference is fully established, there is a shift from pluralized to singular protagonists. For Lawrence, the awareness of the distinction between male and female is simultaneously a recognition of the distinction between the one and the many, self and other, inner and outer.The next two paragraphs describe the outlook (“looked out”) of “the woman”—her distant, visual perspective on “the activity of the world at large” and on men engaged in “fighting outwards to knowledge” (11). The female focus on the outer as utterly distinct from the inner is the first main rupture in consciousness. Lawrence believes that in an integrated mode of knowing, the outer is experienced as the expression, utterance or manifestation of the inner, just as the immanent divinity is an emanation of the transcendental Godhead. Eventually the Brangwen woman compares the vicar to “her own menfolk” and concludes that his “soul was master” of theirs because he possesses greater “knowledge” (12). During the reading of this opening passage, the reader’s mind too has been introduced to more and finer distinctions, and hence to greater degrees of analytic knowledge. Such knowledge involves the creation of new categories, new names; hence, rather appropriately, a Brangwen man is finally named at the end of the

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paragraph: “What power had the vicar over Tom Brangwen—none.Yet strip them and set them on a desert island, and the vicar was the master . . . it was a question of knowledge” (12).The overall movement of the opening passage from Brangwen “people” to “men” and “women” to “a woman” and “Tom Brangwen” parallels the movement in Genesis from androgyous Primal Adam to prelapsarian Adam and Eve to postlapsarian Adam and Eve. The emphasis on “generations” in the novel’s opening sentence highlights the Brangwens’ generative powers, much as “the generations of Adam” are enumerated in Genesis 5. It is significant that the most evocative paragraph in the opening section—the fifth—is the one that describes “the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life” (9–10).The images involve contact, interpenetration and exchange between the Brangwens and their nonhuman but living environment. The description of the exchanges precedes the differentiation into men and women and so applies to all the Brangwens. The order of the images is significant: the first set of images depicts the Brangwens’ passive experience of the powerful activities of the plant and mineral worlds, while the second set describes their active engagement with and mastery over the animal world. This order suggests to readers that any attempt to master nature should be predicated on connection with and appreciation of its power, beauty, and vital value. The sentences describing the felt experience of plants and minerals are punctuated so as to suggest their to and fro, oscillating movements: They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. (9–10) In the first clause of the first sentence the speed (“rush”) of the sap is stressed, while the rest of the sentence mimes the motion of the wave. The wave’s unhalting movement described in the second clause is enacted in the third clause, which also specifies its forward direction.The sense of the wave hitting its crest and hanging suspended is suggested by the “and” set off in commas while the wave’s quick fall is evoked by the brevity of “falling back.”The sentence also enacts in miniature the sense of rising and falling that the novel as a whole is trying to convey. The


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relation between the first clause (describing the sap) and the second (describing the wave) is deliberately ambiguous: the wave could be a metaphor for the sap’s movements, for the specific life energy producing the sap’s movement, or for a more general wave of energy that engenders plant life.This blurring of the specific and the general produces a sense of the embeddedness of the particular plant in its living environment; it is also part of the narrator’s overall strategy in this section of gradually differentiating the reader’s consciousness, of introducing distinctions but not divisions.30 In the second sentence the somatic forms and functions of the minerals are emphasized; the language relies on theriomorphism and anthropomorphism, but not on personification: it draws its figures from the animal or human body (“breast,” “bowels,” “sucked,” “nakedness”), but not from the human personality. When the Brangwens’ active engagement with animals is depicted, their gentle mastery is stressed. It is not a mastery that overwhelms and destroys; the word “will” does not even appear until the end of the passage: They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men.They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridlerings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will. (10) Though the men are clearly controlling the animals, the animals’ rhythms (“pulse,” “heaving”) are powerfully present and are conveyed to the men. The transmission of rhythms is represented by a repetition of words and metre:“the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows . . . the pulse of the hands of the men.” As in the passage describing the plants and minerals, there is a conflation of the specific and the general, but this time the conflation is unambiguous: the horses are explicitly figured as “life.” What distinguishes the forms of intercourse described in this opening section from those depicted in the subsequent accounts of the named generations is not only the pluralized protagonist but also the nearly exclusive focus on exchanges with the nonhuman environment. Humanhuman interchanges involving the medieval Brangwens are implied but only briefly described.They are a “slow-speaking” people who probably rarely engage in conversation. And while the opening pages suggest that they attend church and have business dealings, these activities are vaguely and incidentally treated. The focus of their energies seems to be on the

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natural world. It is also significant that their sex lives are elided.This elision becomes more evident in retrospect—after the sex lives of the named generations are described in detail.The erotic tone of the opening paragraphs suggests that libidinal energy also suffuses their domestic relations: the reader senses that silence and sensuality are palpable in the Brangwen homes. More generally, the narratorial omission of their sex lives indicates that these premodern generations hark back to a time when erotic energy was not as self-consciously reserved for, or exclusively channeled into, sexual activity.The anonymity of the premodern generations underlines the intimation that words—naming—played a less significant role in shaping their erotic activities. It was a time before sexual discourses created sex and sexuality as distinctive forms of bodily contact and pleasure.31 The descriptions of the sexual encounters of the first named generation—that of Tom and Lydia—are rife with Kabbalistic resonances. These resonances more often allude to Kabbalistic concepts of divinity than to actual Kabbalistic terms. Nearly all of the allusions are associated with the unknowable, transcendent Godhead existing behind and beyond the Primal Adam and with the immanent divine forces (sephirot) constituting Primal Adam’s body. For Lawrence, the focal divine force is Shekhinah, the feminine Presence produced by sexual union, but we have seen that he conflates Presence, Crown, and Holy Ghost.At times, he also conflates Kabbalistic imagery of holy heterosexual union with New Testament language depicting the sacramental events in the life of Jesus; this conflation suggests that he sought to sacralize the marital act of coitus and to eroticize Jesus’s mystical transformations.32 Christian interpreters of Kabbalah often try to map Christian theological ideas like the Trinity onto the Jewish idea of the divine powers (sephirot).They note that nine of the powers (all but Presence) can be grouped into a trinity of triads, each triad consisting of a pair of polarized forces and a single equilibrating force.33 Blavatsky asserts that Adam Kadmon is “a trinity; for he is body, soul, and spirit”; moreover,“the kabalistic trinity is one of the models of the Christian one.”34 Believing in the ancient authorship of the Zohar, she traces St. John’s apocalyptic vision of Christ in Revelation 1 to the Zohar’s description of Adam Kadmon.35 In the novel, the emphasis is on sacralizing Tom and Lydia’s acts of intercourse. On their wedding night, Tom is equated with Jesus, while God the Father is linked to the “unknown”—the impersonal “it” that exists “behind” Lydia: The time of his trial and his admittance, his Gethsemane and his Triumphal Entry in one, had come now.


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Behind her, there was so much unknown to him. When he approached her, he came to such a terrible painful unknown. How could he embrace it and fathom it? . . . What was it then that she was, to which he must also deliver himself up, and which at the same time he must embrace, contain? (56) The references to Gethsemane and Triumphal entry stress the death–rebirth rhythm essential for transformation. In “The Crown,” Lawrence also transvalues Christian symbols to express his non-Christian religious ideas. He feminizes God the Father in order to maintain a heterosexual hieros gamos, associating Yahweh with origin-body-earth-fleshfeeling-female and hence with a mother goddess; God the Son is a male god associated with goal-mind-heaven-spirit-thought-male; and the Holy Ghost is an androgynous god linked to soul-formation that comes through the establishment of relationship, especially through sexual consummation. The movement from bodily consciousness to intellectual consciousness, at both the individual and collective levels, is thus associated with the shift from goddess-centered to god-centered religion. In the passage just cited, the couple’s encounter expresses the paradox of Tom simultaneously embracing-containing Lydia and delivering himself up to her.This self-deliverance is simultaneously to her, to that which is behind her, and to the relationship, in that ascending order. The relationship, which is the door to the divinity within, between and beyond them, and which makes life holy, is valued more than unsanctified life and things. Tom wants “to be her husband . . . more than he wanted life, or anything” (56). In “Morality and the Novel,” Lawrence says that sacred encounters are experienced as “beyond life or death” because divinity encompasses both life and death (Study of Thomas Hardy 171). The brief and restrained description of the first act of coitus, though intended to sacralize marital sex, cannot be expected to touch the reader’s deep feelings. As in Lady Chatterley, the revitalization effort is gradual. The abstract and metaphoric depiction of Tom and Lydia’s coupling is given in two sentences and stresses Tom’s emotional experience; the rest of the paragraph (and the subsequent paragraph) treats the emotional consequences for both Tom and Lydia: And he let himself go from past and future, was reduced to the moment with her. In which he took her and was with her and there was nothing beyond, they were together in an elemental embrace beyond their superficial foreignness. But in the morning he was uneasy again. She was still foreign and unknown to him. Only,

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within the fear was pride, belief in himself as mate for her.And she, everything forgotten in her new hour of coming to life, radiated vigour and joy, so that he quivered to touch her. (57) The phrase “reduced to the moment” suggests the language of mystic contemplation. Mystics use contemplative practices to reduce—break down, purify—mundane consciousness to numinous awareness, which is focused on the divine. Evelyn Underhill identifies three phases of mystical contemplation: “recollection,” in which the powers of the self are gathered and focused on a divine emblem;“quiet,” in which distractions are removed and attention is stilled; and “contemplation” proper, in which communication is achieved with God in vision, voice, feeling or intuition.36 Both recollection and quiet bring about “reduction to the moment.” In this passage, sexual encounter is a kind of divine meditation in which the present moment is realized by letting go of “past and future,” but this realization does not involve a disincarnated transcendental consciousness; rather, the sacred experience is fully embodied, an “elemental embrace,” an immanent encounter. The authenticity of the exchange is confirmed for the reader by its fruits: Tom feels pride and believes in himself as a husband; Lydia exudes vigor and joy.The sacred energy that creates strength and elation is literally attractive, making him want to touch her. The transformation of Tom’s consciousness produces a doubly new relationship: to himself and to the world. This new relationship is expressed in terms similar to those used to depict the medieval Brangwens’ exchanges with their environment: It made a great difference to him, the marriage.Things became so remote and of so little significance, as he knew the powerful source of his life, his eyes opened on a new universe, and he wondered in thinking of his triviality before.A new, calm relationship showed to him in the things he saw, in the cattle he used, the young wheat as it eddied in a wind. (57) Relationships—his marriage as well as his connection to things seen and used—take on the subject position in the first and third sentences, suggesting these new exchanges have an independent, dynamic reality. The impersonal “It” referring to the marriage recalls the “it” signifying the “unknown” in the frame scene. The second sex scene occurs after a period of separation and estrangement.This oscillation of togetherness and apartness is the central


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relational rhythm in this and subsequent novels.When the connection is reestablished, Tom experiences an influx of life energy that makes him feel superhuman.The superhuman status of the initiate will later be identified by the phrase “Son of God.” The Theosophists explain the phrase as indicating an initiate into the divine mysteries; Annie Besant explicitly links the phrase to “The Kingdom,” which is another name for Shekhinah.37 In this passage, Tom’s channeling of both creative and destructive divine energies is stressed:“The tension, the bond, burst, and the passionate flood broke forward into a tremendous, magnificent rush, so that he felt he could snap off the trees as he passed, and create the world afresh” (60). During the period just before their sexual encounter, Tom experiences a similar surge—of blood, power, and life: “his limbs seemed strong and splendid to him, his hands seemed like passionate servants to him, goodly, he felt a stupendous power in himself, of life, and of urgent, strong blood” (60). In this sentence, the narrator registers the divine influx on three levels of being: on the animal level as an upsurge in blood; on the level of all life forms as an increase in life energy; and on the cosmic level as increased power.The reference to the three levels of being implies that the reader’s own revitalization involves a transformed relationship to his or her own animal nature, to life in general, and to the cosmos at large.Tom’s hands are “like passionate servants” of his impassioned body just as in Lady Chatterley the hands are agents of Mellors’s and Connie’s bodies. In Kabbalah, the right and left arms of Primal Adam are associated with Lovingkindness and Strength, respectively. Infused with love, Tom’s right hand can create the world afresh; infused with strength, his left hand can destroy the world. Because Tom and Lydia’s relationship remains relatively balanced, they maintain access to the divine potencies within and between them. It is the dynamic stability of their relationship that allows its further growth. In several subsequent exchanges, the narrator uses vivid metaphors of movement, exploration and discovery to indicate the revelatory nature of authentic relationship. One exchange is represented in a manner that literalizes the Kabbalistic notion of God as the Ground of knowledge and being—a ground upon which lovers walk.38 As in the second sex scene, the language of discovery and knowledge is deployed: Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge, their footsteps were lit-up with discovery.Wherever they walked, it was well, the world re-echoed round them in discovery. They went gladly and forgetful. Everything was lost, and everything was found.The new world was discovered, it remained only to be explored. (90)

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In Kabbalah, the right leg of Primal Adam symbolizes the divine energy of Victory, and the left the energy of Splendor. Like all the other sephirot, Splendor and Victory are gateways to divine encounter and consciousness. In effect, the couple celebrate the victorious discovery of the splendor created by their relationship. The theme of movement, exploration and discovery is further extended by the use of powerful door and light metaphors.When Tom and Lydia are transfigured by passion, they open the doors within and between them, doors opening onto a numinous, luminous space far more expansive than a pasture:39 They had passed through the doorway into the further space, where movement was so big, that it contained bonds and constraints and labours, and still was complete liberty. She was the doorway to him, he to her.At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and had stood in the doorways facing each other, whilst the light flooded out from behind on to each of their faces, it was the transfiguration, the glorification, the admission. (90–1) They face each other like the Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies; in between the Cherubim, the divine Presence, Shekhinah, resides.40 In the Gospel of John (10:9), Jesus is also figured as a door:“I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” As in the earlier scene, Kabbalistic resonances are conflated with Christological language—transfiguration, glorification, admission. The conflation of several events in Christ’s life evokes the sense that this coital moment is in and beyond time; it encompasses an entire stage of sacred passage that leads to “entry into another circle of existence” (90).Thus, the new, deeper carnal mode of knowing engenders a change both in time-consciousness and in mode of being. Through the couple’s joint transformation, divinity is made manifest in the world: “Now He was declared to Brangwen and to Lydia Brangwen, as they stood together.When at last they had joined hands, the house was finished, and the Lord took up his abode.And they were glad” (91). Their joined hands symbolize not only their connection to each other but also their joint commitment to be “servants of God.” Their home becomes a Temple of God, another figure for Primal Adam.41 Alternatively, the house can be considered a symbol of “the Kingdom,” another name for Shekhinah. In Kabbalah, the sacred sexual union of husband and wife in the house is said to initiate a sexual union between Shekhinah and Tipheret (Beauty) in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem: as below, so above. In this passage, the house is an expanded inner space that


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includes both Tom and Lydia.The scene is completed by the deployment of another Kabbalistic metaphor: Tom and Lydia are figured as divine manifestations,“the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud,” that offer Anna, implicitly figured as the people of Israel, both “safety” and freedom.The pillars are Shekhinah symbols, though in this case they are conflated with the right and left Temple pillars, between which Shekhinah resides.Anna can play in “confidence,” knowing that her father offers her “assurance on her right hand” while her mother provides “assurance on her left”; the right and left sides of Primal Adam are figured as masculine and feminine, respectively (91). As divine pillars and doors, Tom and Lydia produce a rainbow, another Shekhinah symbol, in the heavens above; the rainbow serves to shelter, and guard the liberty of, Anna down below: “She [Anna] was no more called upon to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch. Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens, and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath, between” (91). Father, mother, and daughter form a trinity, a divine family. According to A. E.Waite, “the Zoharic Trinity [of Father, Mother and Son] constitutes a Divine Family in the World of Heaven” (207). Anna’s association with the Shekhinah is further alluded to in her freedom to play in the space beneath for, as Waite states, the Shekhinah is the “Daughter that . . . came down to earth” and represents “liberty below” (207–8). The figuration of Tom and Lydia as equal pillars or arches with Anna between and below them is an image of perfect balance. Lawrence associates this balance of male and female with an early Renaissance mode of consciousness. In the “Study of Thomas Hardy,” he asserts that during the Renaissance “the theme was . . . the Spirit embracing the flesh in pure embrace. This was the perfect union of male and female” (Study of Thomas Hardy 66). In the novel, Tom is associated with “the female principle” of corporeality, and Lydia is identified with “the male principle” of spirit. Again, the gender inversion mirrors Lawrence’s family dynamics. Kabbalistic conceptions are present in the descriptions of the second named generation—that of Anna and Will—but mystical terms and figures appear less frequently, subliminally informing the reader that there has been a generational drop in access to sacred energy.The decrease in number and intensity of these figures can be expected to produce a corresponding decline in the vivifying power of these passages for the reader. In this section of the novel, the mortification phase begins to gain strength and momentum. As the vitalizing passages decrease, the disintegrative passages increase, as indicated by the greater use of magical (not mystical) language.

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Mystical resonances predominate in the couple’s early encounters, just before and after marriage, suggesting that the relationship is initially fed by the vital energy and openness of youth. However, because the relationship quickly becomes unbalanced, the energy is shunted into internecine combat. Both partners become depleted, and Anna emerges as the empty-handed victor. Because Anna and Will come of age in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, their interactions are shaped by the mode of consciousness that Lawrence associated with the rapid rise of industry and science.42 For him, this rise represents the ascendancy of the male principle of mind and its culmination in the machine principle.The motion of machines produces friction that slowly grinds down the parts. Similarly, individuals who grow up in the machine age and value mind over body develop friction-filled relationships that wear them down. Anna and Will, and subsequent Brangwen generations, possess a modern— post-Renaissance—mentality. For Lawrence, the Renaissance marks the critical turning point in consciousness. He believed that premodernity culminated in the early Renaissance and that modernity commenced in the late Renaissance.43 The many sexual encounters that must have occurred during the several weeks of Will and Anna’s honeymoon are summarized by a few brief but powerful characterizations.Whereas in Lady Chatterley the summary description of a single encounter, like that of Connie and Mick, often had a deflating effect, here, the summary, generic treatment of several encounters contributes to the sense that the experiences are archetypal, like those of the medieval generations. And while in Lady Chatterley, the widespread use of abstract language generally has a bludgeoning, blunting or mortifying effect, here the evocative use of abstract terms contributes to the sense of the numinous encounters being both in and beyond this world. Finally, whereas the ubiquitous use of the stative was meant to convey the stultifying effect of scientific language in Lady Chatterley, here the evocative use of the copula is intended to suggest the numinosity of copulation: “to be” is not static, but potent with seedlike potentiality. In Jewish tradition, forms of “to be” comprise several divine names. Indeed, the central divine name “Yahweh” (the Tetragrammaton) is probably an amalgam of “will be/am/was”; moreover, the divine name “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” (which was revealed to Moses at the burning bush) means “I am what I am”—or more accurately,“I will be what I will be”44 Thus, in these honeymoon passages, Lawrence is able to innovatively and effectively use a variety of devices for vivifying purposes. The descriptions of Will and Anna’s honeymoon experiences concentrate on how they experience the world—the outer world and their


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shared inner world—rather than on how they experience each other. In general, the exchanges focus on the awareness and bridging of boundaries between inner and outer. In one scene they are figured as Noah and his wife during or after the Flood: It was all very well at night, when the doors were locked and the darkness drawn round the two of them. Then they were the only inhabitants of the visible earth, the rest were under the flood. And being alone in the world, they were a law unto themselves, they could enjoy and squander and waste like conscienceless gods. (134) Unlike the scene with Tom and Lydia that stresses doors opening to the unknown, this scene emphasizes doors closing to outside interference. The closing of doors is also part of mystical meditation: the mystic closes her awareness to the ordinary order of things, especially to distractions, and opens her consciousness to the numinous realm. But the metaphor of doors closing represents a less inclusive vision than the metaphor of doors opening, suggesting that Will and Anna’s relationship, even at its height, may not be as all-encompassing, as porous to omnipresent divinity, as Tom and Lydia’s. Having locked out the natural environment, they do not resemble the medieval Brangwens, who always “knew the intercourse between heaven and earth” (10).Yet, despite Will’s merely partial sacred awareness, he is still “translated with gladness to be in her [Anna’s] hands,” just as Lydia had been transfigured in Tom’s hands (139). Closed off from the world of restraining law and duty, the couple become like autonomous gods who freely follow their impulses, not their Christian consciences. This autonomy is also an overthrow of Old Testament law, for a few pages later, the reader learns that “down went his [Will’s] qualms, his maxims, his rules, his smaller beliefs. . . . He stood and gazed and grinned with wonder whilst his Tablets of Stone went bounding and bumping and splintering down the hill, dislodged for ever” (140). By inhabiting the numinous realm of experience associated with the Noachian Age, they precede Mosaic law. The breaking of the Mosaic tablets through matrimonial connection shows Will that “it was true as they said, that a man wasn’t born before he was married”; he thinks that “All that mattered was that he should love her and she should love him and they should live kindled to one another, like the Lord in two burning bushes that were not consumed” (190–1).The burning bush is another Shekhinah symbol, but while the Kabbalists believed that divine inspiration comes from matrimonial union, they insisted that

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this revelation would support, not overthrow, Biblical law. Thus, Lawrence stresses the erotic and cosmic dimensions of Kabbalah while countering what he considered its narrow emphasis on law. At the same time, the numinous experiences of Will and Anna are themselves narrower than those of the medieval Brangwens, who experienced the sacred energy everywhere, even in bushes. For Anna and Will, the burning bush is only a metaphor; their contact with the nonhuman is less extensive. Having established that the inward–outward opposition can be bridged, the narrator then uses a series of extended metaphors based on this polarity.The experience of these metaphors is intended to integrate the reader’s consciousness.The multiplicity of metaphors not only has a cumulative vivifying effect but also demonstrates the relative, dynamic value of any particular incarnation of divine energy, a strategy we saw in Lady Chatterley. The metaphors, most of which can be found in the “Study of Thomas Hardy,” link the inner–outer polarity in the human world to a like polarity in other organic life and in the cosmos at large. Thus, the reader comes to feel that this fundamental opposition can be bridged in all realms of existence.That is, the overcoming of a dualistic relationship with another person or with oneself is fundamentally tied to the overcoming of dualistic responses to nonhuman beings; a sense of integrity within the human realm leads to a sense of integrity with the nonhuman realm, and vice versa. The nonhuman realm includes the biophysical realm of the earth, the cosmological realm of the universe, and the transcendental realm of the Absolute. The first set of metaphors involve botanic life and are used to indicate that the shift from Will’s bachelor life to his married life involves the discarding of his self ’s peripheral, rougher, worldly interests in favor of its core, sensitive, vital impulses. The discovery and development of these impulses is understood as the beginning of a new organic cycle—of a rebirth—and is figured as the unshelling and planting of a nut or seed in rich, fertile soil. In Kabbalah, divine Wisdom is figured as a divine seed; however, Mathers likens Ein Sof (Infinite One) to a seed that contains within it the ten divine powers, while Blavatsky likens Ein Sof to a dark light that becomes radiant light when it emanates.45 While the metaphors of discovery used to describe Tom and Lydia’s exchanges suggested that sacred knowledge could be found in or through relationship with one another, the seed metaphors imply that such knowledge is also obtained by relating directly to the core of one’s own self, a core that is associated with divine reality.The seed metaphors indicate a concentric model of the self, with vital, fragile substance at the center, and expendable, protective qualities


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at the perimeter: So suddenly, everything that had been before was shed away and gone. One day, he was a bachelor, living with the world.The next day, he was with her, as remote from the world as if the two of them were buried like a seed in darkness. Suddenly, like a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience.There it lay, cast off, the worldly experience. He heard it in the hucksters’ cries, the noise of carts, the calling children.And it was all like the hard shed rind, discarded. Inside, in the softness and stillness of the room, was the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent activity, absorbed in reality. (134–5) The shell has been shed, just as the door had been closed. In Kabbalah, the klippot are shells or husks that trap and insulate divine light and so are associated with the forces of evil, the Sitra Achra. The removal of the husks liberates the divine light. In the next two paragraphs, the metaphor of the wheel is used to embody the inner–outer distinction in the cosmos at large.Whereas the organic figures were employed to characterize the vital qualities of the concentrically organized self, this more mechanical figure, of hub and rim, is used to depict Will’s experience of the world as concentrically structured.46 In the first paragraph, the narrator indicates that Will experiences the room as hub and the world as rim.The hub is still, eternal and beyond time; the rim is moving, noisy, distant, time-bound.The wheel of life is a common image in Western and Eastern religious literature and in Platonic philosophy. The description of the room as a center centered upon itself is how the Kabbalah describes the Ein Sof:47 Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the distraction. Here at the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted. (135) The language of negation, coupled with the language of centrality and of the beyond, suggests that the room is experienced as a transcendental reality at the core of the cosmos. In the second paragraph, the wheel metaphor is applied to the couple’s joint experience, their shared moment, within the room. Their joint

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movement to the cosmic center has bridged the inner–outer gap between them: As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise. (135) Paradoxical language is used to both establish and overcome the inner–outer distinction: the inside seems to radiate outward, for “utter radiance” suggests the uttering-outering of radiance.This connotation of “utterance” is also emphasized by the Kabbalists, who conceive the emanations as utterances of the Infinite One.48 A. E.Waite says that Shekhinah “is to [the transcendent] God that which the vowel point is to the letter— a thing not distinct therefrom but the means of its utterance” (347).The odd phrase “silence absorbed in praise” suggests that the silence is absorbed in giving praise or that praise absorbs the silence; either meaning is paradoxical. In a December 20, 1914 letter to Gordon Campbell, Lawrence describes the Cherubim and Seraphim as “absorbed in praise eternally.”49 The Shekhinah resides in the space between the Cherubim. In a later exchange,“pure love” comes between Will and Anna, and Will is figured as a six-winged Seraph absorbed in praise:“Then as if his soul had six wings of bliss he stood absorbed in praise, feeling the radiance from the Almightly beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation” (158). Having applied organic and cosmological analogs to the self ’s core, the narrator then describes this core in more psychological terms. That is, there is a humanization of the inner–outer distinction.The inner “reality” consists of “one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations” (139). These bodily and spiritual forms of desire are “the permanent bedrock,” which is “knitted . . . with the woman one loved” (139). In Lady Chatterley, the bedrock self is more purely sensual for it is revealed during the anal intercourse scene; and the metaphor of knitting is reserved for spiritual connections, probably because of its associations with culture and with the Lady of Shallott.The later novel is more rigid and narrow in its symbolism; the meanings of symbols have become more codified, as they do in the later prophetic poems of Blake. Kabbalistic mystical language is at a minimum in the scenes depicting Ursula’s liaison with Anton Skrebensky, indicating a further decline in


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sacred energy. The initiatory intent in these scenes is more mortifying than vivifying, as we shall see when we examine the use of magical discourses. The couples’s relationship is highly unbalanced, and so their exchanges rarely achieve a numinous quality. They come of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and so represent the first fully modern generation. Anton is especially a man of the times, for he becomes committed to the ideology of the modern state.While he is a soldier in the Boer War, he expresses the view that the integrity of the state is more important than personal integrity:“What did a man matter, personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity” (304). Initially, he had seemed to be Ursula’s match, but both Ursula and the reader soon discover his inability or unwillingness to develop his singularity, strength and courage—all preconditions for being a “Son of God.” In many scenes, his character and impact on Ursula are described in ambivalent terms by using a mix of sacred and mundane discourses. His energy is freeflowing but diminished. While appearing to be one of “those Sons of God” whose “soul stood alone” and whose actions are “spontaneous,” he nevertheless “made no exuberant movement” (271).The expanded consciousness he evokes in Ursula does not include an increased sense of intimacy and individuality.Thus, while he “seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world,” he also provokes in her “a sense of distances and large masses of humanity” (272). Moreover, he makes her feel both more vital and more narcissistic: even while she “thrilled with a new life,” she becomes “For the first time . . . in love with a vision of herself: she saw as it were a fine little reflection of herself in his eyes. And she must act up to this: she must be beautiful” (272).The link between ocularcentrism and narcissism is stressed, as it is in Ovid’s myth of Narcissus. Most of the numinous language is reserved for describing Ursula and Anton’s relationship before their first act of sexual intercourse. Thus, Ursula feels that her “adventure in life was beginning” and that she has entered the “world of passions and lawlessness” which is “another, harder, more beautiful, less personal world” (277). This illicit, passionate world recalls the licentious honeymoon experiences of Will and Anna. And after Ursula and Anton kiss, she is genuinely “all warm with electric warmth, as if the gush of dawn were within her, upholding her” (278). Later, his “awareness” and “attentive[ness]” make her feel “rich and augmented,” as if “she were the positive attraction and he the flow towards her” (280). But the lack of sacred discourse in the depictions of the coital acts themselves indicates that the relationship is unbalanced. The discourse of magic, mesmerism and hypnosis predominates in these scenes.

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D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience III. Magical Language in the Mortification Phase

While mysticism stresses the union with God out of a sense of love, reverence or obedience, magic emphasizes the calling forth of numinous forces to attain human ends. Christian Kabbalists like the Rosicrucians— unlike most Jewish Kabbalists—place a heavy accent on magic. Eliphas Levi, a nineteenth-century Rosicrucian, was especially interested in the magical side of Kabbalah. He was an acknowledged master of magic and a vivid writer, whose writings were later translated by A. E. Waite. Defining magic as “the traditional science of the secrets of Nature which has been transmitted to us from the Magi,” Levi employs the Kabbalistic language of forces, polarization and equilibrium.50 He also stresses the role of will and knowledge: “TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENCE—such are the four words of the Magus.”51 An accomplished magician, he says, is “invested with a species of relative omnipotence and can operate superhumanly.”52 Levi distinguishes between “a Divine and an Infernal Magic,” the latter being a “false science” connected to the devil; indeed, while the “magician is the sovereign pontif of Nature, the sorcerer is her profaner only.”53 MacGregor Mathers, a Rosicrucian and Mason, made magic a cornerstone of his Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the occult society to which Yeats belonged for many years. In 1900, Mathers published a translation of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Lawrence believed that magic was more than hocus pocus. In an April 28, 1918 letter to Mark Gertler, he says that “Certainly magic is a reality— not by any means the nonsense Bertie Russell says it is” (Letters, vol. 2, 1565). But Lawrence was critical of magic precisely because of its stress on will and intellect. His critique may have been influenced by Evelyn Underhill, who links magic to the scientific will to knowledge and control: In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge.This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness, until it includes the supersensual world.54 Lawrence also associated magic with an ancient, unrecoverable mode of consciousness: Magic also interested me a good deal. But it is all part of the past, and part of a past self in us: and it is no good going back, even to the wonderful things.They are ultimately vieux jeu.55


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Thus, he acknowledges that magic may once have been wonderful— when humans beings were less self-conscious and intellectual. Lawrence uses the language of magic, mesmerism and hypnosis to register sustained imbalances in the energetic exchanges of the second and third named generations. As we said, he follows the Kabbalists in associating prolonged disequilibrium with evil and sometimes with black magic. He uses magical discourse to indicate that self-conscious, selfcentered, and coercive elements have disrupted the freeflowing exchange between participants.The magical language is often deployed in the context of combat and hunting metaphors that indicate a power imbalance between conqueror and conquered, hunter and hunted. Mesmerism and hypnosis are treated as degraded, pseudo-scientific versions of magic. Magic, mesmerism, and hypnosis all put one person’s mind and will under the control of another’s. Lawrence believed that the trances induced by magical or hypnotic means are transient mental states that trick the conscious mind, not the body; they do not engage the soul (the deep unconscious):“A trance means that all her individual, personal intelligence goes to sleep, like a hen with her head under her wing. But the apparatus of consciousness remains working.Without a soul in it” (Studies in Classic American Literature 102).The dynamic equilibrium and minimal self-consciousness in the mature erotic relationship between Tom and Lydia is indicated by a near absence of magical terms in the depictions of their exchanges. In contrast, magical discourse is very much present in the portrayals of the last series of exchanges between Will and Anna and between Ursula and Anton. In “Anna Victrix,” Anna’s defeat of Will produces a powerful restructuring of their relationship. Hierarchy, not dynamic equilibrium, is the new mode of organization, and within this structure, neither has a balanced self: hers is ruled by Apollonian day consciousness while his is dominated by Dionysian night consciousness. Thus, the imbalance between them is matched by imbalances within them; the two forms of disequilibrium dialectically construct one another. While Anna is the overall victor, her victory is most apparent during the day: she is figured as “the daytime” and has “daytime authority,” while he is “the shadow” (201).At night, he is “potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness” and rules her (201). In other words, mentally she rules him; physically, he dominates her; but since mind ultimately has supremacy over body, she is the ultimate sovereign.56 A conscious, willful interchange occurs between the couple a few years after Ursula’s birth. Unlike earlier marital battles in which each tries to dominate and destroy the other, this encounter is figured as that of a

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black tomcat who stealthily and hypnotically overcomes his feline mate. In effect, Anna allows Will a specious sense of sexual triumph, knowing that she has won in the overall game of life. The hypnosis metaphor stresses the interplay of the couple’s eyes; his ocular light darkens her consciousness and eye: Sometimes, when his eyes met her, a yellow flash from them caused a darkness to swoon over her consciousness, electric, and a slight, strange laugh came on his face. Her eyes would turn languidly, then close, as if hypnotised.And they lapsed into the same potent darkness. (200) As in Lady Chatterley, the focus on eyes indicates that head-centered manipulation is involved.The hypnotic stealth results in sexual manipulation, not mutual exchange. The next paragraphs are replete with the discourse of spells, trances, insinuations and other magical or hypnotic effects.They are intended to have a mildly repulsive, mortifying effect on the reader.The focus is again on the eyes: Only she knew him when the darkness set him free, and he could see with his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark.Then she was in a spell, then she answered his harsh, penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke up, electric, bristling with an unknown, overwhelming insinuation. . . . She learned not to dread and to hate him, but to fill herself with him, to give herself to his black, sensual power, that was hidden all the daytime. And the curious rolling of the eyes, as if she were lapsing in a trance away from her ordinary consciousness became habitual with her. . . . And she, in all the darkness, belonged to him, to his close, insinuating, hypnotic familiarity. (200–1) Will’s hypnotic powers, at first novel to Anna, soon become known, and her own trances quickly become routine (“habitual”). His impact on her diminishes because neither his power nor her response are rooted in the numinous unknown; rather, his power is based on recalled, recycled energy, not on fresh force, while her trance is a “mechanical” shutting down of surface consciousness that does not lead to the opening of a more expansive consciousness based on immediate feeling. Magical, mesmeric, and hypnotic discourses are ubiquitous in the depictions of Ursula’s and Anton’s encounters, and these discourses are deployed in the context of negatively inflected combat and hunt


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metaphors. These passages are intended to have the most powerful mortifying effects on the reader. As the most modern generation, the couple are the least in touch with the unselfconscious, sacred energies of the body, and the most in contact with the conscious, willful forces associated with the modern ego. Still, neither Ursula nor Anton has the characteristics of the extreme modern type portrayed in Lady Chatterley. Lawrence portrays Clifford and his comrades as so committed to the intellectual life that they are nearly devoid of vitality.While Anton may not be exuberant, he initially has much bodily force; it is his subsequent failure to participate as a mature individual in a mutual exchange that will finally deplete his vitality and emasculate his soul. The dance at Fred Brangwen’s wedding is the prelude to the sexual encounter that will nullify Anton’s self-esteem. The dance is figured as “endless . . . movement” that “would continue forever” (295).There has been a breakdown in the movement–exploration–discovery motif that was vividly represented in the scenes involving Tom and Lydia. The polarized connection between Ursula and Anton has dissolved, and each moves infinitely in his or her own direction.The relationship no longer possesses the requisite rhythm of movement and rest, and because desire does not issue in “consummation,” positive passion is not renewed.The couple have not surrendered their wills to their emotional bond; instead, their wills are “locked in a trance of motion, two wills locked in one motion, yet never fusing, never yielding one to the other. It was a glaucuous, intertwining, delicious flux and contest in flux” (295). They are fixed in the Heraclitean flux of the world, incapable of peace, stillness, transcendence. The dance bifurcates into a discordant contest as the dancers pursue their own motions, tendencies, satisfactions. The mortifying language becomes increasingly intense. Like the split between Anna and Will, the bifurcation between Ursula and Anton is figured as light against dark, moon against earth/underworld. Ursula is drawn to, identified with, and filled by the “great white moon,” which represents the reflected, cool, hard light of mind or ego as well as “the cold liberty to be herself, to do entirely as she liked” (296). Instead of desiring Anton, she wants “communion” and “consummation” with the moon, and so “cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light” and “her body opened wide like a quivering anemone” (296). The cold, hard, indomitable passion that fills her makes her hands feel “like metal blades of destruction” (297).They are no longer servants of Primal Adam bestowing a balance of Lovingkindness and Strength; rather, Strength has won out. Her corrosive power is also associated with the “pillar of salt” she becomes (297). Similarly, in

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Lady Chatterley, Connie, before affirming her “worship” of Mellors’s maleness, is compared to one of the Bacchae who seeks to use and tear apart Mellors; only when their bond is reestablished does her body open like an anenome to the gamekeeper. In The Rainbow, Anton is linked to “the depths of the underworld” and its “dark, impure magnetism”—the forces of black magic (295–6). Disturbing hunt and battle metaphors, emphasizing the use of and resistance to power, structure the modern couple’s engagement.They are meant to intensely repulse the reader. Anton strains his will “to encompass and compel her” and “to weave himself round her, enclose her, enclose her in a net of shadow, of darkness, so she would be like a bright creature . . . caught” (297). Only by capturing her can he “have” and “enjoy” her. She resists the “soft weight” of his body always “bearing her down” and “overcoming her life and energy, making her inert along with him” (297). Eventually she becomes “a beam of gleaming power” and is “seized” by “a sudden lust . . . to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into nothing,” and her hands and wrists feel “like blades” (298). Her youthful lust has developed into an annihilating power. Their act of sexual intercourse is figured as a combat-hunt in which each tries to capture the other.The narrator seeks to repulse the reader by reporting the painful, destructive effects of their coital encounter. Anton attempts to “net” Ursula, to capture “the salt, compact brilliance of her body,” while “her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight” (298–9). Because Ursula is more connected to her vital powers, the contest results in her soul “triumph[ing],” much as Anna’s had, but while Will’s soul had revived to some degree, Anton’s is decimated: “his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more”; he was a “nothingness” (299). This is not the positive self-obliteration that precedes spiritual rebirth, as it did in the case of Connie Chatterley; rather, it is a sterile emptiness. Because Anton has prevented his self from individuating and connecting, it atrophies and is eventually destroyed. Ursula is unwilling to acknowledge what she has done; instead, she “restored the whole form and figure of him. But the core was gone” (299–300). This core is his “distinct male” self (300). Significantly, the defeat of his masculinity is registered in his heart: it is not sexual impotence that causes his emasculation, but a failure of emotional strength. A strong heart is tempered by intense erotic activity, while a weak heart is incinerated. Having lost his power, Anton “would be subject now, reciprocal, never the indomitable thing with a core of overweening, unabateable fire” (300). His unwillingness


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to know the depths of his singularity is one reason for his weakened male identity; another reason is the knowledge that he no longer has hypnotic influence:“the male in him was scotched by the knowledge that she was not under his spell nor his influence” (306–7). His abuse of his male power, which he had used to create transient, trance effects, results in its loss. In an exchange that occurs after his return from the Boer War, he recovers a little of his lost influence; for a short while, she is “aware of him as if in a mesmeric state,” but she refuses his marriage proposal, sensing that he “had no soul” (384, 386). The psychonarration of their relationship after Anton’s return from a six-year stay in India makes it clear that the couple have talked themselves into considering a new beginning possible. Their largely physical connection is enough to give them glimmers of hope, but the series of erotic encounters of this mismatched pair inevitably leads to the dissolution of the relationship because their rapprochement is not based on deeply felt passion.The initial erotic encounters seem to have a genuinely transformative effect on Ursula, indicated by the reappearance of the mystical, Edenic language of “original immortality” and “pristine darkness of paradise,” but the next few interchanges indicate that Ursula’s connection with nature and with religious monuments is more profound than her tie to Skrebensky (418). During their trip to Rouen, Anton realizes that Ursula prefers the city and its church to her contact with him.The language of death—“he had a cold feeling of death”—is reintroduced to describe his experience of his diminished position (422). Similarly, when they go on vacation to Sussex, she experiences him as a nonentity: as they make love, it is if she connects with the stars, instead of with him, much as she had earlier connected with the moon. Because he has extinguished his own male, starlike singularity, she instead relates to actual stars: “it was as if the stars were lying with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming her at last. It was not him” (430–1). In their last sexual encounter, the mortifying language of combat reappears, and Anton is again declared the mortal loser: “The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead. . . . He felt as if the knife were being pushed into his already dead body” (445).Thus, the couple’s failure to produce a mystical exchange gives way to a lethal struggle involving magical-mesmeric forces and ends in psychic death for Anton and in relationship death for both. We have seen that named Brangwen generations embody the historical shifts in consciousness associated with the rise of modernity, which is

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initiated, in Lawrence’s view, during the Renaissance. Consciousness becomes more and more splintered. The result is that larger and more enduring splits are created between mind and body, self and other, human and nonhuman. Thus, the later generations experience inner schisms and outer conflicts more frequently and intensely.The increase in both internal and external disharmony produces distortions in vital energy symbolized by the shift from mystical to magical discourses.The willful, irresponsible use of erotic energy in turn leads to psycho-spiritual destruction; hence, the language of black magic is ultimately a language of power and annihilation.As the reader proceeds through the novel, his or her consciousness is increasingly subjected to the mortifying effects of the magical discourse and decreasingly introduced to the vivifying effects of the mystical discourse.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Mechanistic and Yogic Discourses in Women in Love

I. War and Science It has been observed that the world Ursula Brangwen inhabits at the beginning of Women in Love seems to be very different from the one she dwells in at the end of The Rainbow. Some critics have argued that the discrepancy indicates that the two novels do not form the “organic whole” that Lawrence had intended in “The Sisters” project.1 Others see the gloomier setting of the second novel as an extrapolation of the destructive tendencies present in the modern world of the first.2 My analysis of the language of the destructive and vivifying phases in Women in Love suggests that the novel is both an extension of and break with The Rainbow. The catastrophe of World War I, which Lawrence was experiencing as he wrote Women in Love, once titled Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), revealed to him that any hope he might have had for the rejuvenation of European civilization was idle.3 The war also incited in him a terrible misanthropy.4 The destructive social forces had triumphed, and the only solution now conceivable to him was a small-scale one: the self-renewal of a coterie of “natural aristocrats,” of a clan of couples willing to detach themselves from the decadent body politic and to “save” themselves by forming new types of relationships.As readers begin Women in Love, they discover that Ursula’s hopes have been turned topsy turvy: her vision of the rainbow has been inverted, darkened, and gone underground; it is now a vision of the pit, a hellish mine where “[m]an was the arch-god of earth” (223).The advent of the war has split Ursula and her generation in half: they had one form of existence before the war, and another afterward.

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It is important to appreciate that Lawrence’s “war book” is less against war than against the Great War, and less against the latter than against the conditions, the destructive mindset, that produced it. Indeed, the only mention of the war is in the author’s foreword: [I]t is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters. (485) Like Nietzsche, Lawrence valued struggle as an intrinsic characteristic of human life and as a test of heroic virtue but opposed wars that fail to further the creative evolution of life.5 The distinction between war in the service of life and that aiding death is always a slippery and dangerous one, but Lawrence clearly believed that World War I was largely aligned with the forces of death. For him, the scientistic mindset is mainly responsible for producing the modern hells of mechanistic science and military–industrial enterprise. Colin Clarke has stressed that in Women in Love Lawrence distinguishes between destructive forces that further life and those that oppose it, but we have seen in our analysis of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that the passion for disintegration is not easily contained and effectively employed.6 In the later novel, the satiric narrator often crosses the line and annihilates the characters rather than displaying a “discriminative sympathy” for them. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s annihilating impulse is at a high, and it is probably fair to say that the novel’s assaultive effects are more potent than its sacralizing impact. On July 27, 1917, Lawrence wrote Waldo Frank that Women in Love is “purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating.”7 Thus, while the novel has an initiatory structure, its vivifying impact is certainly less than that of The Rainbow. Because of Lawrence’s pessimism and misanthropy while writing Women in Love, we can assume that he expected to touch only a small group of readers.8 Because these readers inhabited what he considered to be a dying world, he thought it essential to first expose and kill off the mental habits that had given rise to this cataclysmic state of affairs. Hence, we find a transformational structure in which the mortification phase appears first, followed by the gradual introduction of the vitalization phase.This phasal order—first destroy, then create—would be employed in the rest of his major novels. In Dies Irae, decimation dominates; the vivifying sex scenes are few, and some critics have found them unconvincing.9

Mechanistic and Yogic Discourses

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In The Rainbow, we saw that Lawrence used the shift from mystical to magical language to signify the devolution of European culture from the religiously vital and integrated Middle Ages to the splintered, depleted modern period that commenced with the late Renaissance. In Women in Love, the intensifying process of decay associated with contemporary times is suggested by the persistence of magical language and its conflation with scientific discourse. Lawrence considered the motivating force behind both magic and science to be the will to knowledge and power. Mechanistic science is for Lawrence the quintessential modern expression of this double impulse.Thinkers from Frazer to Freud had emphasized a tripartite view of cultural change—from magic to religion to science— but it was the technology-assisted War that disclosed to Lawrence the extreme costs of scientific “advancement.” Lawrence was able to conflate black magic and mechanistic science because their discourses are overlapping: both employ a system of oppositional forces governed by the dynamics of attraction and repulsion. In fact, several nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists and philosophers who influenced Lawrence were using many of the same terms that Kabbalists employ.10 For example, Herbert Spencer, in First Principles (1862), uses the terms “force,” “balance,” and “equilibrium” to describe fundamental physical and biological processes.11 And Spencer, like Lawrence, believes that human freedom “must result from the complete equilibration between man’s desires and the conduct necessitated by surrounding conditions” (506–7).12 In The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1900), the German biologist and natural philosopher Ernst Haeckel, probably influenced by Goethe’s vitalistic biology, uses the metaphor of lovers to describe the forces of attraction in the universe.13 Like Lawrence and the Kabbalists, he sees human love as a manifestation of cosmic affinitive forces.14 Haeckel believes that pantheism is necessarily “the world-system of the modern scientist”; for him, God is “an intramundane being . . . everywhere identical with nature itself, and . . . operative within the world as ‘force’ or energy” (288–9).This view, which he derives from Spinoza, parallels the Kabbalistic idea of the immanent God, figured as the sephirotic Tree of Life, but the Kabbalists, and Lawrence, also insist on a transcendent Godhead, an Infinite One that produces and encompasses the manifest deity.15 In Women in Love, Lawrence is not trying to trash science summarily by lumping it with black magic; rather he is attempting to transvalue scientific discourse by associating destructivity with a mechanistic outlook. He does not want to stop science but to expand its aims, methods, and objects. He wants science to make simultaneous and integrative use of all

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the human powers of knowing—what he calls sensation, emotion, intuition, reasoning, instinct—and to understand things intimately in their interrelationships with other things, rather than to perceive things in part, in isolation and at a distance. And he insists that science serve vitalistic, creative values, not death. Given Lawrence’s interest in the status of the scientific enterprise, it should not be surprising that in the years immediately following the publication of Women in Love, he wrote his two quasi-scientific books on the unconscious, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). In these half-serious, half-playful books, he tries to sketch out an experiential, life-centered “science” of the future.16 By using the term “science” to describe his intuitive, imaginative system, he wants to retrieve the original meaning of the word as “knowledge”—a knowledge derived from all the human powers of knowing, not just the knowledge gained from the experimental method developed in the modern period.17 In the Foreword to Fantasia, he writes: Only let me say that to my mind there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-andeffect relationship. I have nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic function and apparatus of life.18 Mechanistic science is associated with functionality, instrumentality and, above all, with death. It is even more deadly than black magic because it denies animism and posits nonliving matter and energy as the universal substrates.Though black magic has destructive aims, its central premise is that the magical forces that govern the universe are living forces that can create or destroy. A mechanistic view proposes that life is secondary, adventitious, while Lawrence believed that life is primary, originary. In the “Cosmological” section of Fantasia, he insists that “[t]here never was any universe, any cosmos, of which the first reality was anything but living, incorporate individuals” and that death is “the negative reality of life . . . what we call Matter and Force, among other things” (181). Matter and physical energy are derived, he asserts, from the decomposed


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dead bodies of once-living individuals.19 In Apocalypse, Lawrence sees “science and machinery” as the “death products” of a collective human consciousness that is undergoing a “long, slow death” brought about by the post-Renaissance substitution of “the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order” for the living cosmos (79). My analysis of the destructive phase focuses on the compositional strategies used in the sex scenes involving Gerald and Gudrun. I also treat the episodes involving Gerald’s domination of three other female figures—Minette, the mare and mother earth—because these interactions prefigure his sadomasochistic relation with Gudrun, provide most of the language to describe their sexual activity, and indicate the pervasive subjugation of the feminine principle of the feeling body. One of the strategies that Lawrence deploys to ensure that these scenes have a disintegrative impact on the reader is the linking of willful, egoistic or self-conscious sex to violence, domination, cruelty, decomposition, annihilation, and death. These destructive qualities are in turn tied to disequilibrium, often indicated by lack of mutuality—a pattern we saw in The Rainbow. A second strategy is to connect destructive sex to a mechanistic perspective, which involves using terms associated with machines (mechanical, mechanistic, metal, friction, repetitive motion, instrument) and with a whole range of physical forces (radioactivity, electricity, magnetism, phosphorescence).This mechanistic discourse will be deployed to characterize the whole range of Gudrun and Gerald’s relationship: not only how they treat human beings, but also how they relate to other living beings. This dispersion of mechanistic terms highlights the allencompassing effects of mechanistic thinking.While a mechanistic view is equated with destruction in The Rainbow, machine language is not deployed when describing the sexual acts themselves. It is as if the prewar third generation (Ursula and Anton) is spared the full effects of the dehumanizing power of science and technology. In Women in Love, in contrast, the infiltration of mechanistic discourse into the erotic episodes implies that the advent of the War or a war mentality, though not directly acknowledged in the text, has caused that generation to experience the full annihilating force of modern science, technology and industry. “[P]ure mechanical organization” is now explicitly linked to “pure organic disintegration” and is understood as “the first and finest state of chaos” (231). The combined effect of Lawrence’s two compositional strategies is to suggest that the modern consciousness that produced a Newtonian macrocosmic vision of a cold, mechanistic, indifferent, unliving world,

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and that reproduces this world microcosmically in the form of destructive machines, is the very same consciousness that produces sexual violence. The modern conception of the universe as fundamentally dead is a worldview that engenders killing machines and sadistic sexuality. Even though World War I itself is elided, it is implicitly understood as a natural outcome of this worldview. The suppression of the War shifts the reader’s attention away from the particular sociopolitical conditions that gave rise to it and toward the pervasive but only partially visible Western Weltanschauung that produced these conditions. A third disintegrative device associates modern sex with headcentered modes of consciousness: vision, rationality, intellectualism, reflexivity, verbosity.This tactic was also employed in The Rainbow, but not as pervasively.The widespread use of this approach indicates the efflorescence of a logocentric and ocularcentric mentality. A fourth destructive technique is to expose the pseudomysticism and the head-centeredness of sexual acts that mime mystical merger but in fact involve the destructive subjugation of one partner by another. This technique often involves, as it did in The Rainbow, the mixing of mystical and magical discourses. In Women in Love, however, magical discourse is not as consistently negative in tone, suggesting that Lawrence may have been trying to present two forms of magic: one negative, and one more positive.Though he probably did not affirm the view held by Christian Kabbalists like Eliphas Levi that white magic is good, and black magic is bad, Lawrence seemed to arrive at the understanding that a mystical encounter could contain some positive magical qualities. II. Mechanistic Discourses in the Disintegration Phase The narrator stresses the triple linkage of egoism, violence, and mechanism when depicting Gerald’s relationship with Minette in “Creme de Menthe.” This relationship gives the reader a foretaste of the sadomasochistic dynamics that will unfold in his relationship with Gudrun. The depiction of their first encounter conflates the power discourses of science and conquest; Gerald’s electric bodily energy is a subjugating, destructive, cruel force: She appealed to Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous.The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would


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be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in her separation, given. (65) “Voluptuous” and “turgid” are coded adjectives; they are consistently linked to destructive activity. “Voluptuous” is here associated with Gerald’s disintegrative erotic energy, and “discharge” suggests the lightninglike explosiveness of the male orgasm. “Voluptuous” is later used to characterize Hermione’s ecstatic experience of smashing Birkin on the head; although her experience is not manifestly sexual, it represents an outburst of her frustrated, aggressive, sexual energy: “she was going to know her voluptuous consummation. . . . She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last” (105).“Turgid” is also linked to Gerald’s phallic destructiveness and is later used to describe the lotus plants that are the object of Gudrun’s “sensuous vision”: “she could feel their turgid fleshy structure” (119). She responds with both attraction and fear to the abusive masculine power that the lotus signifies.To Birkin, the lotus is a symbol of disintegration:“lotus—marsh-flowers” are “white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection” signifying “universal dissolution” (172).“Phosphorescent” and “sensuous” are also coded adjectives associated with disintegration. In “Gudrun in the Pompadour,” the “ecstasy of reduction” is described as “the phosphorescent ecstasy of acute sensation”(383).In “Class-Room,”Birkin distinguishes “sensuous”from “sensual” by saying that the former involves persistent self-consciousness:“That’s why they aren’t sensual—only sensuous—which is another matter.They’re always aware of themselves—and they’re so conceited,that rather than release themselves, and live in another world, from another centre, they’d—” (45). This sensuous reflexivity is a form of self-voyeurism: Birkin says that “In our night-time, there’s always the electricity switched on, we watch ourselves, we get it all in the head, really” (44). The self-conscious quality in Gerald’s sense of power, and the visual– cognitive dimension of Minette’s fascination with him, are highlighted in a subsequent description of their interaction: She wanted to know. And her eyes seemed to be looking through into his naked organism. He felt, she was compelled to him, she was fated to come into contact with him, must have the seeing him and knowing him. . . . Also he felt, she must relinquish herself into his hands, and be subject to him. She was so profane, slave-like, watching him, absorbed by him. It was not that she was interested in what he said; she was absorbed by his self-revelation, by him, she wanted the secret of him, the experience of his male being. (67)

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Gerald’s hands are not servants of his body that give erotic pleasure, as they are for Tom Brangwen and Oliver Mellors; rather, they are instruments of subjection that make a slave of Minette. In this passage, the mystic language of absorption is conflated with the head-centered language of sight and self-consciousness. In “Fetish” (called “Totem” in most published editions) Halliday will explicitly criticize ocularcentrism: “Oh— one would feel things instead of merely looking at them. . . . I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual—we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong” (78). In “Class-room,” Birkin attacks Hermione for being hypervisual and reflexive: “what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental” (42). In another scene, in which Gerald and Minette actually make physical contact sitting next to each other in the car, the language of absorption is again deployed, but this time their encounter occurs in a logocentric, rather than an ocularcentric, context. During a diffuse conversation, in which her voice rings like a bell, she consciously, subtly fuses herself into him: The Pussum [Minette] sat near to Gerald, and she seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness, and concentrated at the base of his spine like a fearful source of power. Meanwhile her voice sounded out reedy and nonchalant, as she talked indifferently with Birkin and with Maxim. Between her and Gerald was this silence and this black, electric comprehension in the darkness. . . . Still her voice rang on like a bell, tinged with a tone of mockery.And as she swung her head, her fine mane of hair just swept his face, and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity. But the great centre of his force held steady, a magnificent pride to him, at the base of the spine. (72–3) Metaphors of physical force—attraction, friction, magnetism, and electricity—shape this passage. Both Minette and Gerald are subtly manipulating a “naturally” magnetic situation; they are playing with electromagnetic fire. The bell simile also calls attention to the metallic quality of Minette’s voice and links her to mechanism. Her absorption is as much self-pushed as drawn by Gerald’s magnetism and is only partial since her consciousness is split between attending to Gerald and to Birkin and Maxim. Even her conversational attention is doubly split: in


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its focus it is divided between the two men, and in its form it has the dual perspective of mockery. Friction is associated with electricity and the nerves, which are linked to mind.20 The contact thus sets up a conflict within Gerald between nervous excitation and spinal steadiness. The great center of force at the base of Gerald’s spine is, as Thomas Miles and Gerald Doherty have argued, the sacral chakra.21 We saw that in The Rainbow the body’s centers of energy and consciousness are usually described in Kabbalistic terms. In depicting the more modern and cosmopolitan world of Women in Love, Lawrence uses Hindu terms to portray the body’s centers.22 The Hindu science and art of actualizing human potential is called “yoga”; the word has the same root as “yoke” and means both “to unite together” and “to place under disciplined training.”Yoga is a training method designed to lead the aspirants to sacred union and integration through proper stimulation and alignment of the body’s chakras.Tantric yoga is the art of sacred sexuality that extends yoga practice into the erotic sphere. Lawrence had a precedent for treating the Yoga and Kabbalistic systems as relative equivalents: the Theosophists had emphasized the parallels.23 Both yoga and Kabbalah identify seven levels or zones of energy-awareness in roughly the same areas of the body.24 One of the main differences is that the Hindu system assigns more value to the lowest (seventh) chakra, located in the sacrum. This chakra is understood as the reservoir of the kundalini energy—the “serpent power” or life force—that flows through all seven chakras.Thus, Lawrence’s shift from a Kabbalistic to a Hindu model of bodily energies and consciousness does not indicate a change in his conception of psychosomatic dynamics; rather, because the Hindu system is a more fully articulated model of psychosomatic dynamics than is the Kabbalist system, it enabled Lawrence to demonstrate more clearly how forms of energy and awareness flow through the body. He explicitly refers to the usefulness of the chakras in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious: Having begun to explore the unconscious, we find we must go from centre to centre, chakra to chakra, to use an old esoteric word. We must patiently determine the psychic manifestation at each centre, and moreover, as we go, we must discover the psychic results of the interaction, the polarized interaction between the dynamic centres both within and without the individual. (35) And whereas the Kabbalist system symbolically associates certain moral and spiritual properties (like lovingkindness, strength, beauty) with particular regions of the body, the Hindu system asserts that each bodily region

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actually has particular energetic and responsive qualities. That is, the chakras are not meant to be symbolic but to represent the body’s actual powers of knowing and acting. In Women in Love, the yogic theory of the chakras serves as an experiential, quasi-scientific framework for understanding human consciousness and action.Yogic theory is at the heart of Lawrence’s “subjective science.” In the mortification episodes involving sexual exchanges between Gerald and his female partners, the characters’ lower chakras (located in the sacrum, genitals, and navel) are dominated by their the upper chakras (located in the crown, brow, and throat). In other words, the energy and consciousness of the head region controls the energy and consciousness of the lower body.When these head-centered chakras dominate, the language of mechanism proliferates and the yogic discourse partially recedes.This eclipse of the yogic discourse by the mechanistic discourse indicates that the characters’ bodies are functioning like mind-driven machines instead of spontaneous organic systems. In contrast, the sacralizing scenes involving Birkin and Ursula depict a free flow of energy within and between their lower chakras; the head-centered chakras remain inert rather than regnant during their exchanges. In these scenes, the proper functioning of the characters’ bodies is indicated by the pervasive use of yogic discourse. The reader is not presented with an account of Gerald and Minette’s coital acts, and the omission suggests that their encounters are too violent and perverse to represent.25 However, the nature of the interactions, especially of their impact on Minette, is indirectly indicated by the analogy between Minette and the African statuette of a “negro woman in labor” (78). On the morning after Gerald and Minette sleep together, he “saw the Pussum [Minette] in it [the statuette]. As in a dream, he knew her” (79). What Gerald sees is: “the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman,African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath” (79). The extreme sensation that the pregnant African woman experiences is pain, and it can be surmised that Gerald has sadistically produced a similar sensation in Minette.A confirmation of this connection occurs when the reader subsequently discovers that Gerald’s movement toward Minette evokes in her an “inchoate look of a violated slave, whose fulfilment lies in her further and further violation” (80). Minette’s masochistic desire for further violation demonstrates how intertwined are her desires for pleasure and pain. Her victimization in turn intensifies his sadistic impulse: her inchoate look “made his nerves quiver with acutely desirable sensation.After all, his was the only will, she


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was the passive substance of his will. He tingled with the subtle, biting sensation” (80). The sadomasochistic experience is a profane facsimile of mystical encounter: instead of two persons surrendering their selves to one another and thus participating together in a unified experience, a weak person sacrifices her will to her stronger partner, whose one will now governs them both.The absorption of one will by another is really a form of narcissism, not of mutual exchange. The perverse parodying of genuine mystical encounters is one of the novel’s main disintegrative strategies. Mechanical sexual interactions are frequently portrayed as quasi-religious experiences.The dissimulation is not always obvious; sometimes it is indicated by the subtle mixing of mystical, magical, and mechanical discourses; other times, it is more explicitly suggested by words like “obscene” or “abhorrent” whose general meanings are clearly negative; at times, code words like “phosphorescent” and “voluptuous” are associated with negative events in one passage and then used in other more ambiguous passages to suggest an overall negative valence; and in one instance, the narrator explicitly warns the reader of a character’s (Gudrun’s) “fictitious transport” (418). Lawrence considered mechanistic science to be a twisted translation of mysticism. Gerald expresses this perversity when he undertakes “translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation” (227). In effect, Gerald reduces the organic to the mechanical, rather than seeing the mechanical as the death phase of an all-encompassing life process. For Lawrence, the final test of the authenticity of a sacred experience is always the impact on the participants.When the effect of the encounter is not mutually revitalizing, then the experience is deemed pseudosacred or at best partially numinous. In “The Crown” (1915), Lawrence emphasizes that creation and destruction are “divine” only when they are “pure” processes, untainted by egoistic will and intellect (Reflections on the Death 292–3). The comparison between the statuette and Minette suggests that the African civilization that produced the woodcarving is related to the European civilization that engendered Minette—and the reader.According to Birkin, the African civilization represents, “Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme” (79).African culture is seen as a mirror of modern culture: while the primitive African culture is said to limit the mental development of both men and women, modern European culture restricts the development of women like Minette and in effect engenders mindless, suffering savages; and by

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overemphasizing the intellectual development of men and a few elite women, European culture stymies their sensual development. Symbolically, African culture is decapitated, while modern culture is all head (and all capital-ism).Though the caricatures are crude and offensive, they suggest that the different cultures use their psychosomatic energies differently: the Africans concentrate and develop the energies associated with the chakras of the lower body while the Europeans work with their upper chakras, to the neglect of the lower. Lawrence is attempting to map culture onto the body, showing how cultural ideas and practices precipitate, channel, and impede the flow of psychosomatic forces. The common denominator between the primitive African and the modern European civilizations is partiality: both allow one part of the human organism to dominate the others; they fetishize the part rather than affirm the whole. Lawrence suggests that violence and degradation occur when any psycho-physical sector has tyrannical control, whether it be the head at the expense of the rest of the body or the sensual body without intellect. In “The Crown,” Lawrence associates “partial being” with knowing in “one direction only” and with being “always relative” and “unconsummate” (Reflections on the Death 267). The symbolism of African culture is further clarified and elaborated in “Moony” during Birkin’s reverie about another fetish that he had seen at Halliday’s. The passage links partial consciousness with corruption and death, symbolized by beetles, particularly the Egyptian scarab: There came back to him . . . a statuette . . . a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa. . . . It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her . . . knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. This was why her face looked like a beetle’s: this was why the Egyptians worshiped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption. (253)


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Though the experience is called “mystically sensual,” the race had “died, mystically,” which indicates that the experience is a perverse imitation of creative, mystical encounter (253).26 For the West African, “goodness,” “holiness,” and the “desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed” (253).The rest of Birkin’s reverie emphasizes that this mindless mode of consciousness is deathly because the “connection with life and hope” has been broken and “pure integral being” has been splintered (253). As in The Rainbow, this breaking and splintering is deemed a “fall” (253). Moreover, Birkin compares the “burning death-abstraction” and “sun-destruction” of the “awful African process” to the “mystery of icedestructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation” of “[t]he white races” (254). The two types of destruction/abstraction are related but distinct processes: the African process “abstracts”—extracts, separates out, thins out—the body’s upper energies by overemphasizing the lower chakras; the Caucasian process abstracts the lower energies by overstressing the upper chakras. The scene in “Coal-Dust” in which Gerald subdues the mare as the train approaches establishes ties among willfulness, domination, destruction, domestication, and mechanism. It also suggests that the female (whether horse or human), or the feminine principle of the feeling body, is often the object of the modern male’s aggression. Gerald is identified with the train, since it is an instrument of his colliery organization, and it is by and between machine and machine-user that the mare is caught, subdued, and symbolically raped. In the two-page scene, the narrator assaults the reader’s mind by repeating words signifying power: “force” appears four times;“press” three times;“hold,”“will,” and “bring [down/ back]” twice; and “pull,” “thrust,” “grasp,” and “throw” once. Ultimately, these bombarding repetitions are meant to pave the way to a breakthrough in the reader’s awareness. The train’s invasive power is initially manifested in its ability to shatter silence:“The sharp blasts of the chuffing engine” and “[t]he repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise” terrify the mare (110). The train’s noise and unimpeded forward movement, coupled with Gerald’s unrelenting and overpowering will, reduce the mare to a soulless machine operated by spring coils: the wincing, terrified mare “recoiled like a spring let go,” yet Gerald “brought her back again, inevitably” for the “pressure of his compulsion” just outweighs “the repulsion of her utter terror” (110–11).The very inevitability of Gerald’s fixed will and domineering force suggests the repetitive certainty of mechanistic action: he “held on . . . with an almost mechanical relentlessness” (111). In “The Industrial Magnate,” the narrator describes prolonged, unvarying repetition as characteristic of “a great and perfect

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machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition ad infinitum” (228).27 We saw in Lady Chatterley that Lawrence clearly distinguishes between mechanical and rhythmic repetition and that he often uses the former to mortify the reader and the latter to revitalize the reader. The locomotive itself is portrayed as a kind of terrifying sexual machine that sadistically rapes the mare. Although the train is once referred to as a “her,” trains are commonly phallic symbols because of their shape and power. Moreover, this locomotive has a “clanking steel connecting-rod,” and as it appears on the high-road, it causes the mare to “rebound[ed] like a drop of water from hot iron” (110).That is, the mare acts as if it is terrified of the train’s hot, steely, invasive phallic force.The mare is in effect caught between two masculine forces: the male human will and its inhuman symbolically masculine product: But he sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying. (111) The thumping action of the trucks suggests sexual pulsations, and the wheel metaphor (“wheeling mare”) adds to the sense of the mare’s reduction to machine. As the train passes, the symbolic double rape becomes even more sadistic:“The connecting chains were grinding and squeaking as the tension varied, the mare pawed and struck away mechanically now, her terror fulfilled in her, for now the man encompassed her” (111–12).The grinding of the connecting chains will later be echoed in Gerald’s “frictional” sex with Gudrun:“The terrible frictional violence of death filled her” (344). In “Coal-Dust,” Gerald is “like a keen edge biting home” into the mare and is “keen as a sword pressing into her” (111). The image of Gerald sinking into the mare “magnetically” recalls the language of sinking and magnetism in the earlier scenes involving Minette. The linkage between this scene and subsequent episodes portraying the acts of intercourse between Gerald and Gudrun is strengthened by Gudrun’s emotional identification with the violated mare. But while the mare is encompassed by terror and suffering, Gudrun’s experience is not wholly painful; there is an admixture of maschochistic pleasure:“she [the mare] spun round and round on two legs, as if she were in the centre of some whirlwind. It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which


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seemed to penetrate to her heart” (111).The image of the whirlwind is a twisted copy of the sacred vortex; we saw a positive version of the vortex in a scene characterizing Connie’s orgasmic experience in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Gudrun’s “poignant dizziness” soon escalates into a pleasurable–painful swooning, the effect of having vicariously experienced a sadistic encounter.While Ursula cries out with horror that the mare is bleeding, Gudrun “looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare, and she turned white. . . . The world reeled and passed into nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more” (112).The sadistic Gerald draws blood, and the vicarious experience of cruel penetration is a kind of visual and cognitive fulfillment for Gudrun.When she recovers, she becomes “hard and cold and indifferent,” much as she does after sex with Gerald (and much as Ursula did when coupling with Skrebensky). Then, she replays the experience visually and at one remove, through the eyes of the train guard: “through the man in the closed wagon Gudrun could see the whole scene spectacularly, isolated and momentary, like a vision isolated in eternity” (112). Here we see the theatre metaphor that is so prevalent in the destructive phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The scenes in “The Industrial Magnate” depicting Gerald’s relation to another female figure, mother earth, also provide terms, images, and metaphors that will be used to describe his sexual relation with Gudrun.28 As one of the captains of the coal industry, Gerald pits his will against the forces of the earth. In the machine age, his dehumanized will is the instrument for raping mother earth and hoarding her organic matter: The coal lay there in its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter, as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will of man.The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the arch-god of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man’s will as the absolute, the only absolute. And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits of victory were mere results. . . . What he [Gerald] wanted was the pure fulfilment of his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. (223–4) The eroticized aspect of Gerald’s subjugation of coal/matter is emphasized by the repetition of “lay” and “will”: he has his will with the inert, prostrate earth lying before and beneath him.The sexual language appears in the context of a battle metaphor, much as we saw in mortifying scenes in

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The Rainbow; but here the battle is no contest as General Gerald—he is likened to “a general”—musters his prodigious technological forces against the passive earth. In a subsequent passage, Gerald’s industrial organization is parodically conceived as a collective human effort expressing the mechanistic impulse of “the Godhead of the great productive machine” (225). Human mind and will serve inhuman, mechanistic aims as they despoil the earth: He had a fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed.This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will.And for this fight with matter, one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism so subtle and harmonious in its workings that its represents the single mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement, will accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he had to subjugate. (227–8) In this scheme, a mechanistic relation to the earth is, point by point, parodically given religious significance: the collective, productive human will is the transcendental God (“the productive will of men was the Godhead”); human production is the manifestation of that will and hence the manifest, dynamic deity (“the God-motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum”); and the human leader of the productive effort is an incarnate God (“Gerald was the God of the machine. Deus ex Machina”).29 Mechanical production replaces human generation and is repetitive without variation; it spins infinitely.The industrial effort even has its own parodic version of ego-annihilation as human beings give up their lives to serve the system, the mechanical whole: The men were satisfied to belong to the great wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. . . . They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike.Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. (231) Gerald’s “marvellous adjustment” of human and nonhuman “instruments,” and his “marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one great perfect entirety,” are malicious acts of domination. Beneath Gerald’s “plausible


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ethics of productivity,” Birkin sees “perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice” (56).30 Gerald’s subjugation of his own sensual and compassionate impulses is reflected in his effort to dominate the earth and his own workers.The macrocosm of the industrial system is a projection, an imposition, of the microcosm of the abused self. In “Rabbit,” Gerald and Gudrun’s will to dominate life is associated with their satiric attitude toward the rabbit that Gerald has subdued. Similarly, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we saw that satire is a dominant technique in the novel’s mortification phase. As Gudrun dismisses the rabbit as “a sickening fool,” the “vindictive mockery” in her voice makes Gerald’s “brain quiver” (242).31 Gudrun and Gerald’s “mocking, white-cruel recogition” is registered in their eyes and reveals that “There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both.They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries” (242). As desecrators of life, they are thus initiates in the perverse forms of life’s mysteries, much as Gerald’s industrial activities are perversely religious. The couple’s league constitutes a kind of twisted blood fellowship, for while Gerald is unable to commit to be Birkin’s blood brother, he does become Gudrun’s blood partner by seeing, not touching, her blood: the “deep red score” that he sees—which perhaps has vaginal resonances for him—tears “the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond” (242).32 The slitting of the surface of Gerald’s consciousness to reveal “the obscene beyond” is a twisted version of the dissolving of mental consciousness that leads to positive numinous experience. In his Introduction to Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, probably written in 1929, Lawrence imagines the surface of human consciousness to be covered over by a “vast parasol of our conception of the universe” that keeps us from “breath[ing] in life from the living and unending chaos.”“The Absolute Umbrella” can be “either religious or moral or rational or scientific or practical.”This “contrivance and invention of our mind” is a “bubble reality” and must be “roll[ed] up” or “burst” if we are to gain “a breath of the live chaos . . . the fathomless chaos of things passing and coming” (Phoenix 258–9). In Women in Love, the narrator will burst the bubble that encloses Gerald and Gudrun and so reveal the obscene beyond at the base of their relationship. Subsequent sexual encounters between Gerald and Gudrun will be depicted as further forays into this obscene beyond. In “Snowed Up,” Gudrun’s contempt for life will become explicit; for her and for Loerke, “Art and Life were . . . the Reality and the Unreality” (448). As the two artists play their “curious game . . . of infinite suggestivity, strange and leering,” they enact the obscene beyond on the verbal plane (448).

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Birkin’s letter to Halliday in “Gudrun in the Pompadour” describes the reductive process that takes place when sexual activity is not spontaneous, mutually affirming, and unselfconscious. The letter acts as a discursive gloss of the reader’s experience of Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship. A similar description of the reductive process can be found in “The Crown” and “Love” (1918) and so indicates that Birkin’s position is Lawrence’s.33 Though the letter explicitly addresses Halliday’s relationship with Minette, it aptly applies to Gerald’s relationship with Gudrun. Birkin writes that “in the great retrogression, the reducing back of the created body of life, we get knowledge, and beyond knowledge, the phosphorescent ecstasy of acute sensation,” and he advises Halliday to either “go on till it is fulfilled” or transcend this desire for disintegrative pleasure and knowledge and follow “the living desire for positive creation, relationships in ultimate faith, when all this process of active corruption, with all its flowers of mud, is transcended, and more or less finished” (383). This desire for reduction aims to tear apart the “complex unity” of male and female: this desire—for the constant going apart—this passion for putting asunder—everything—ourselves, reducing ourselves part from part—reacting in intimacy only for destruction—using sex as a great reducing agent, by friction between the two great elements of male and female obtaining a frenzy of sensual satisfaction— reducing the old ideas, going back to the savages for our sensations— always seeking to lose ourselves in some ultimate black sensation, mindless and infinite—burning only with destructive fires, raging on with the hope of being burnt out utterly. (384) The phrase “ultimate black sensation, mindless and infinite” links this passage to that portraying the African process of reduction. The desire to tear apart “the complex unity” of male and female resembles the Kabbalistic idea that evil emerges from the sundering, and subsequent disharmony, of masculine and feminine forces.A similar understanding of evil is found in Blake’s later prophetic poems. Shortly before Gudrun and Gerald’s first sexual act is narrated, the reader learns that the two are possessed by a brutal passion for each other: “both felt the subterranean desire to let go, to fling away everything, and lapse into a sheer unrestraint, brutal and licentious” (287).This language of license and unrestraint is reminiscent of Will and Anna’s honeymoon, one of the only times when they had a balanced relationship; however, with Gerald and Gudrun, brutality is also mentioned, indicating an


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overbalance of negatively destructive forces.When Anna and Will enter their malicious phase, they are characterized as “opposites, not complements”; similarly, Gudrun and Gerald are said to be “separate, like opposite poles of one fierce energy” (399). Negative destructivity is stressed in the succeeding description of Gudrun and shows that sadism is the other side of her earlier masochistic behavior: A strange black passion surged up pure in Gudrun. She felt strong. She felt her hands so strong, as if she could tear the world asunder with them. She remembered the abandonments of Roman licence, and her heart grew hot. She knew she wanted this herself also—or something, something equivalent. Ah, if that which was unknown and suppressed in her were once let loose, what an orgiastic and satisfying event it would be . . . black licentiousness. . . . She wanted it with him, this unacknowledged frenzy. (287) In The Rainbow, Tom Brangwen had felt strong with the power to both destroy and create the world, whereas Gudrun feels strong with annhilating power alone, much as Connie Chatterley feels during her brief Bacchae phase in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.The reference to Roman licence also anticipates the “night of sensual passion” in which Connie and Mellors engage in anal sex and explore the mysteries of sex as Abelard and Heloise once did.34 But in Lady Chatterley the anal sex scene occurs after the mutual tenderness of the lovers has been established, so that its cutting edge is dulled. The release of Gudrun’s suppressed aggression recalls Gerald’s conversation with Birkin in which Gerald says that letting people do what they want will result in mass killing: sensing Gerald’s suppressed hostility, Birkin says, “That means you would like to be cutting everybody’s throat” (33). Gerald and Gudrun share the passion for slitting throats. The first two erotic scenes involving Gudrun and Gerald occur in “Death and Love,” one before and one after Thomas Crich dies. Their lovemaking is thus associated with Thomas’s death struggle and with his deadly relationship with his wife, Christiana. She suffers from his “subjugation,” but he persists in ignoring her hawklike (aristocratic) nature and maddened condition and instead “thought of her as pure, chaste . . . a wonderful white snow-flower” (218). Again, the feminine principle of the feeling body is suppressed. The kind of relationship that Mr. and Mrs. Crich have is also what Gerald and Gudrun possess: “a relation of utter interdestruction” (217). In a July 16, 1916 letter to Catherine Carswell, Lawrence writes that an “act of love, which is pure thrill, is a kind of friction between opposites, interdestructive, an act of death.”35

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The first erotic episode is narrated largely from Gudrun’s perspective and emphasizes her analytic self-consciousness. It occurs under “the square arch where the road passed under the colliery railway” (330). The arch has perverse sexual connotations since “arch” or “vault” (fornix) is the root of “fornication” and is associated with prostitution.36 The sexual connection between Gerald and Gudrun is thus associated with the train bridge, which is mechanistic in two senses: it is associated with the train that had menaced the mare; and it is square, rectilinear, reflecting the linear thought of mechanistic science. In The Rainbow, rounded arches have organic meanings, while pointed arches have more Christian spiritual connotations. Gudrun’s consciousness is understood as a split, reflexive, judging, calculating, and possessive mode in which she is constantly comparing herself to other women and ranking Gerald in relation to other men: she wants “to stand under the bridge with her sweetheart” because “she knew that under this dark and lonely bridge the young colliers stood in the darkness with their sweethearts”; she desires Gerald’s embrace because “how much more powerful and terrible was his embrace than theirs [the other colliers’], how much more concentrated and supreme his love was, than theirs in the same sort!”; and she realizes that “the colliers’ sweethearts would, like herself, hang their heads back limp” (330–1). As she relates to Gerald, her eye and mind are on other persons; she does not relate directly, exclusively, to him. After the embrace, her attention becomes focussed on Gerald’s head, particularly his face, indicating that her head-centered consciousness desires a cognitive relationship with his. His face is even associated with Eve’s apple, which Lawrence uses to symbolize self-reflexive, dualistic knowledge: She looked up, and in the darkness saw his face above her, his shapely, male face. There seemed a faint, white light emitted from him, a white aura, as if he were a visitor from the unseen. She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge, and she kissed him. (331) Even her hands seem in service of her head, for she “wanted to touch him . . . till she had him all in her hands, till she had strained him into her knowledge” (332). These are the manipulative hands that carve animals tiny enough to be gripped: “always . . . small things, that one can put between one’s hands” (39). Her mental power to “strain” has the double sense of abstraction and tension/stress; in both senses, she distorts and diminishes who he is.The visual details of Gerald’s face—she touches his “eyes . . . nostrils . . . brows . . . ears . . . neck”—resemble those of Michaelis, the ocularcentric playwright in Lady Chatterley.


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The narrator subsequently reveals that Gudrun’s hands are the instruments of her controlling, calculating, greedy mind. They have Gerald “under their power” and are “eager, greedy for knowledge” but are “intelligent” and only take in as much as they can effectively receive (332). Her absorption of his erotic energy must be measured—that is, consciously monitored and modulated—because that energy has a destructive quality: “her soul was destroyed with the exquisite shock of his invisible fluid lightning. . . . And this knowledge was a death from which she must recover” (332). His lightninglike orgasmic energy has the power to electrocute her, much as his “discharge” of “electricity” earlier had the power to “destroy . . . utterly” Minette (65).Thus, Gudrun balances greed for energy and knowledge against fear of self-annihilation. The gaining of knowledge about his body is figured as the harvesting of energy from a radioactive field: “Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands upon the field of his living, radio-active body” (332).The metaphor of radioactive energy reduces his bioenergy to physico-mechanical force; and the harvest metaphor perversely applies an organic process to an inorganic one and implies an act of plundering. The harvesting metaphor also links to the earlier metaphor of Gudrun straining Gerald into her knowledge. Eventually, the harvest metaphor gives way to a bird metaphor: “There were all the after days when her hands, like birds, could feed upon the fields of his mystical plastic form” (332).The simile suggests ravenous predatory birds, perhaps vultures, which in “The Reality of Peace” (1917) symbolize living beings that have “locked . . . [their] unalterable will[s] for ever against life and death” (Reflections on the Death 43). In contrast, we saw how in Lady Chatterley Lawrence uses the bird figure to symbolize a numinous moment of perfected relationship—the balance of polarities represented by the bird’s body connecting and equilibrating the two wings. The second erotic scene involving Gerald and Gudrun describes a pseudomystical act of coitus. Gerald’s father has just died, and Gerald desperately seeks out Gudrun and awakens her from sleep.The narrator offers Gudrun’s perspective, which focuses on Gerald’s face: Save for the extreme beauty and mystic attractiveness of this distinct face, she would have sent him away. But his face was too wonderful and undiscovered to her. It fascinated her with the facination of pure beauty, cast a spell on her, like nostalgia, an ache. (343) The mixing of mystical and magical language suggests that the “mystic attractiveness” is deceptive; it is a temporary, illusive glamor produced by

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a spell. The clue to this fake mystical encounter is not only the headcentered focus and the intrusion of magical discourse but also the comparison to nostalgia—a longing for home and the past.37 An authentic mystical exchange is, for Lawrence, always in the present.The use of the qualifying language of analytic logic (“Save for,” “But”) also works against creating the sense of a mystical encounter. Moreover, Gudrun consents to the act of intercourse not because she positively desires connection, but because his powerful, rigid will impels her acquiescence:“he seemed fixed in an odd supernatural steadfastness. . . . She was lost now. She had no choice” (343).Their sexual act is not a reciprocal exchange; rather, it is represented as Gerald pouring out his own deathly orgasmic energy into her: He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. It was wonderful, marvellous, it was a miracle.This was the ever-recurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist.The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation. (344) Gudrun is subjected to Gerald, just as Minette, the mare and the earth were. And Gudrun is the receptacle for Gerald’s own self-destructive energy. In effect, he extroverts his own introverted aggression. The language suggests sadomasochism, as it did with Minette; the frictional violence evokes the mechanical, abrasive action of steel against steel or against some softer substance. Mixed in with this language of subjection and violence is the numinous discourse of miracle, marvel, wonder, and wholeness.Again, the blending of sacred and profane discourses indicates that the encounter is falsely mystical.Yet it is still temporarily restorative for Gerald: it offers him immediate relief. Some of his relief comes from his sense of control over Gudrun as well as his transitory escape from the pressing anxieties of being out of control in the rest of his life (he cannot save his sister or father, create satisfying work, or love his friends fully). But the very fact that this and previous “miracles” have not transformed his sadistic relation to sex is itself proof of the fraudulence of the miracle. He becomes “whole” only in the sense that he becomes temporarily energetically balanced, having released an overabundance of negativity; but he is not whole in the sense of being integrated and connected.


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Moreover, his ecstatic response is driven as much by reflexive knowledge as by experience: the “knowledge” of the “miracle,” as much as the encounter itself, gives him “ecstasy of relief and wonder.” In a fully sacred encounter, he would experience peace, not just relief. In “The Reality of Peace,” Lawrence describes peace as “that perfect consummation when duality and polarity is transcended into absolution”; he distinguishes peace from “quiescence and resignation,” which are its “hopeless equivalent” (Reflections on the Death 51, 32). There is not only an outflow of Gerald’s deathly energy; there is also an influx of Gudrun’s life energy. Gerald experiences this influx as a restorative bath of life. The bathing metaphor compares Gudrun’s regenerative power to the healing effects of sunlight and water: He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest in the bath of her living strength. It seemed as if her heart in her breast were a second unconquerable sun, into the glow and creative strength of which he plunged further and further. All his veins, that were murdered and lacerated, healed softly as life came pulsing in, stealing invisibly into him as if it were the all-powerful effluence of the sun. . . . He felt his limbs growing fuller and flexible with life, his body gained an unknown strength. He was a man again, strong and rounded. And he was a child, so soothed and restored and full of gratitude. (344) The encounter does restore Gerald’s physical vigor, and the child metaphor suggests that he might even be spiritually reborn, as Connie is after her bath of life in Lady Chatterley. But the next passage indicates that his becoming a child is not a spiritual rebirth but a psychological regression; it is another simulation of a religious event.38 He responds to Gudrun as if she were his mother, much as the infant in Michaelis appeals to the mother in Connie:“And she, she was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was. And he, child and man, received of her and was made whole” (344). The mother–child metaphor indicates a power imbalance.While the healing of his body is mentioned, special attention is given to the restoration of his “damaged brain,” indicating how much of his negative energy is associated with his mind. It is as if the destructive and creative elements of the life force collect and build in the brain, and since they have no real outlet in positive, integrated action, they slowly destroy mind and body. Because of Gudrun’s powers of regeneration, Gerald is “infinitely grateful, as to God, or as an infant is at its mother’s breast” (345). His body seems restored, but a truly reciprocal exchange would have produced a superabundance

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of energy that would have transformed them both. Instead, Gerald has, like a parasite, fed off Gudrun’s energy, while she remains emotionally cut off. Gudrun’s reverie in “Snowed Up” confirms that the mother–child metaphor is not to be positively valued: Perhaps he got some repose from her. Perhaps he did. Perhaps this was what he was always dogging her for, like a child that is famished crying for the breast. Perhaps this was the secret of his passion, his forever unquenched desire for her—that he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him repose. What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him. (466) The soothing effects of sex are thus rejected as an inadequate justification for having intercourse. In contrast, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the seeking of comfort is deemed a sufficient reason for sexual coupling when the exchange occurs in the context of a relatively balanced, sacred relationship. When the narrator finally offers Gudrun’s point of view, she is shown to be wide awake, unable to lose herself in sensual contact, hyperconscious of time, far-sighted yet seeing nothing. Her consciousness simulates an authentic numinous consciousness: she is seemingly “conscious of everything” (345).The activation of her reflexive and farsighted consciousness makes her aware of the gap between herself and Gerald; she realizes that her conscious state and his unconscious state put them worlds apart: “Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being!” (346).This is the “knowing in terms of apartness” that Lawrence associate with the analytic— especially the scientific—mindset. Gerald’s ejection of his own pent-up violence into Gudrun’s subjected body has produced in her a “state of violent active superconsciousness” (346). It is as if the destructive energy associated with his willful mind is funneled through his body into her body, where it finally lodges in her mind.The energy is not transformed or transvalued; it remains basically mental and negative.This transformational failure is due to the coercive nature of the encounter, the intensity and extent of Gerald’s negativity, and Gudrun’s general inability to surrender her mental awareness. While she temporarily gives in to his demand for sex, she stays in control by remaining vigilant. Even though she may want to lose herself, her lifelong practice has been to remain hyperwatchful. As she becomes weary from watching and analyzing


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Gerald, her mind reverts to a consciousness of the past, to a knowledge created by memory, instead of by present feeling and sensation: She was conscious of everything—her childhood, her girlhood, all the forgotten incidents, all the unrealised influences and all the happenings she had not understood. . . . It was as if she drew a glittering rope of knowledge out of the sea of darkness, drew and drew and drew it out of the fathomless depths of the past, and still it did not come to an end, there was no end to it, she must haul and haul at the rope of glittering conscious[ness], pull it out phosphorescent from the endless depths of the unconsciousness, till she was weary, aching, exhausted, and fit to break, and yet she had not done. (346) The passage illustrates the meaning of knowledge as grasping or apprehending something and stresses the willful nature of this process. The drawing, hauling, and pulling of elements from the unconscious recalls Gerald’s pulling back and reigning in of the mare: Gudrun pulls on the rope of consciousness to satisfy her craving to dominate men mentally; Gerald pulls on the reigns of the mare to satisfy his will to dominate female creatures. The third sexual encounter occurs in “Snow” (in “Continental” in other editions) as soon as Gerald and Gudrun arrive in their Tyrolese hotel room. The scene echoes the episode in which Gerald subdues the mare and immediately follows Gudrun’s “strange rapture” as she gazes out of the window at the valley and mountains (401). This rapture produces a gulf between her and Gerald, and the act of intercourse is his attempt to force a connection; it is a near rape. Had not Gudrun still been dazed by her vision, she might have put up a great struggle, like the mare, but instead she weakly resists and is easily overcome by his metallic strength: He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness, her inert, relaxed weight lay against his own surcharged, bronze-like limbs in a heaviness of desirability that would destroy him, if he were not fulfilled. She moved convulsively, recoiling away from him. His heart went up like a flame of ice, he closed over her like steel. He would destroy her rather than be denied. But the overweening power of his body was too much for her. She relaxed again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium.And to him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forgo one second of this pang of unsurpassable bliss. (402)

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When Gudrun recoils as the mare had, Gerald’s bronze-like limbs become steely; that is, her resistance intensifies and hardens his aggression, piques his sadism. Not only is he willing to torture her, he is also prepared to endure being tortured in order to have his bliss; he is sadomasochistic, and she is an instrument of his pleasure.The choppiness of the passage—successive sentences or pairs of sentences switch joltingly back and forth between his perspective and hers—demonstrates that the encounter is not harmonious; it also has the effect of disorienting the reader. In contrast, in Lady Chatterley, the numinous scenes interweave the somatic focalizations of Connie and Mellors in a smoother, more seamless way, often in the same sentence. Again, Gerald is apparently positively affected by his cruel sexuality, for the numinous language of transfiguration is used to describe his face: “ ‘My God,’ he said to her, his face drawn and strange, transfigured,‘what next?’ ” (402). His invocation of the deity is really an invocation of the demonic.39 Indeed, as we discussed in chapter 3, sacred energies become demonic when they become extremely out of balance. Gudrun’s response indicates that whatever the nature of his transfiguration is—and it seems to be the gleam of Gerald having discovered new depths to his own pleasure and cruelty—she has been reduced to a stunned girl:“She lay perfectly still, with a still, child-like face and dark eyes, looking at him. She was lost, fallen right away” (402). Moreover, she does not hear him when he says, “I shall always love you” (402). This portrait of Gudrun resembles Loerke’s statuette of the overpowered “naked girl, small finely made, sitting on a great naked horse”; but the abused girl experiences more “shame and grief ” than does the sadomasochistic Gudrun (429). The powerful sculpted stallion resembles Gerald, for it is “rigid with pent up power” and its “neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle” and its “flanks were pressed back, rigid with power” (429). Gudrun looks at Gerald vacantly,“as at something she could never understand, never: as a child looks at a grown-up person, without hope of understanding, only submitting”; later, she responds to Loerke’s stallion by going “pale” and experiencing “a certain supplication, almost slave-like” (402, 429). Her bafflement is not the incomprehension that one experiences in having had a genuinely numinous encounter (with the radically new, the radically unknown); rather, it is the confusion experienced when one has had an encounter with someone or something that is already known to others but not to oneself.Thus, to a child, even the conventional action of “a grown-up person” would be bewildering, even though there is nothing numinous about that action. In their previous encounters, Gerald had been characterized as the needy, grateful child; now Gudrun is the


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stunned, abused, submissive child. This reversal is part of the oscillating process of dominance and submission:“But always it was this eternal seesaw, one destroyed that the other might exist, one ratified because the other was nulled” (445). Both enact the weak qualities of children, not the joyful, spontaneous, creative attributes that Lawrence values. Halliday, the arch degenerate, is called “a perfect baby” by Minette, who is herself childlike. It is significant that the next day, during a brief reverie in which Gudrun considers marrying Gerald, she thinks of him as “sheerly beautiful . . . a perfect instrument”: “To her mind, he was a pure, inhuman, almost superhuman instrument. His instrumentality appealed so strongly to her, she wished she were God, to use him as a tool” (418).The image of her as God making use of the perfect instrument recalls the image of Gerald as Deux ex machina using the perfect instrument of the mining organization (colliers and machines):“for this fight with matter, one must have perfect instruments. . . . He, the man could interpose a perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he had to subjugate” (227–8). Both Gudrun and Gerald dream of being masters of the machine. And each considers the other an implement of pleasure. They treat one another as means, not ends. They have, using Martin Buber’s language, an “I–it” relationship, not an “I–thou” relationship. The penulitmate sex scene occurs after Gudrun admits that she does not love Gerald and after she forces him to say he does not love her. It intensifies the link between sex and violence. Gerald is enraged and in despair, and his “heart was whispering. . . .‘If only I could kill her— I should be free’ ” (442). The destructive impulse in Gerald reaches its final pitch, and the act of coitus is portrayed as an awful killing process: He turned and gathered her in his arms. And feeling her soft against him, so perfectly and wondrously soft and recipient, his arms tightened on her, she was as if crushed, powerless in him. His brain seemed hard and invincible now like a jewel, there was no resisting him. His passion was awful to her, tense and ghastly and impersonal, like a destruction, ultimate. She felt it would kill her, she was being killed. “My God, my God,” she cried, in anguish, in his embrace, feeling her life being killed within her. And when he was kissing her, soothing her, her breath came slowly, as if she were really spent, dying. “Shall I die, shall I die?” she repeated to herself. (444) Again, there are the quick, jolting switchbacks between points of view. And there is the invocation of the deity in the midst of a sadistic,

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pseudo-sacred encounter.The word “crushed” recalls the statuette of the pregnant African woman whose face was crushed in agony.This is also a sinister literalization of the cliche of sex as the little death, for this sadistic act is so violent as to be almost killing.Again, the brain is emphasized; this time its hardness and invincibility are stressed. The real culmination of Gudrun and Gerald’s sex life occurs as they physically attack each other at the end of “Snowed Up.”This scene literalizes the connection between sex and death. It is easy to forget that Gerald’s attempt to strangle Gudrun is partially in response to her hitting him (she also struck him in “Water-Party”). After Gerald knocks down Loerke, Gudrun “raised her clenched hand high, and brought it down, with a great downward stroke, over the face and on to the breast of Gerald” (471). Her blow recalls that of Hermione, who had “brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his [Birkin’s] head” (105).40 The blow to Gerald produces a kind of ghastly spiritual conversion in which he experiences “great astonishment” and “wonder” as “his soul opened” “wide, wide . . . feeling the pain” (471). Instead of the blow leading to a sense of renewed connection with nature, as it does with Birkin, it piques a desire to murder Gudrun: his soul “laughed, turning, with strong hands outstretched, at last to take the apple of his desire. At last he could finish his desire” (471). Earlier, his face had been an apple of knowledge for her; now, she is the apple of his murderous desire. The portrayal of their interaction combines different terms and metaphors from previous sex scenes—beauty, crushing power, sadistic satisfaction, and violent, lustful frenzy: He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft. Save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush.What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come into her swollen face, watching the eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a god-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling.The struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased. (471–2) In Genesis, God pronounces “and it was good” after each day of creation, whereas here the divine pronouncement is parodically associated with


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the “God-given gratification” of human destructiveness. The passage suggests that Gudrun gains lustful satisfaction from her near-death throes; moreover, the softening of her movement diabolically imitates the postorgasmic softening of the body. It is only the sudden accession of “contempt and disgust” and “nausea” that causes Gerald to refrain, for he realizes that he had not “cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands” (472).“I didn’t want it, really” is “the last confession of disgust in his soul, as he drifted up the slope” (472). Now,“sunk under a sense of nausea,” he only wants to “go to sleep” (472). Earlier the release of pent-up aggression had induced sleep; now the partial release of aggression produces the urge for the sleep of death.41 III. Yogic Discourses in the Revitalization Phase As in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the novel’s sacralizing phase oscillates with the mortifying phase because Lawrence wants the reader to undergo a gradual process of transformation, comparable to a snake slowly shedding its old skin as it puts forth new tissue. While destructive devices are deployed in scenes depicting Gerald’s sexual encounters with Minette and Gudrun, revitalization techniques are used in the episodes portraying Birkin and Ursula’s erotic interplay.The vivification phase is shorter, less elaborate, and arguably less persuasive than the disintegration phase, for Lawrence was more filled with wrath toward war-racked Western civilization than with hope that he could rejuvenate his readers—or himself. He was also pessimistic about the possibilities of such revitalization even when aimed at a coterie of sensitive and intelligent readers. During 1915–16, he had been unsuccessful in recruiting Bertrand Russell, John Middleton Murry, and other English friends to participate in his utopian community called Rananim.42 As individuals, Birkin and Ursula differ little from Gerald and Gudrun. As Birkin himself acknowledges in “Water-Party,” he and Ursula are also “flowers of dissolution”; but they differ from Gerald and Gudrun in not being “altogether . . . pure flowers of dark corruption—lilies” (173). It is their greater openness to growth, as well as their opposition to sadomasochism, that enables them to choose the way of life. A high level of aggression is present in their relationship, but it is mainly manifested verbally, whereas with Gerald and Gudrun the primary outlet is their sexual encounters.43 It is important to stress that while Ursula and Birkin’s sex life includes the “shameful” and “degrading,” it does not include sadomasochism (413). This form of sexual violence is excluded from the “whole round of experience” because it is only appropriate as a final

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antilife act of moribund couples like Gerald and Gudrun, and Halliday and Minette (413). In “Gudrun in the Pompadour,” Birkin’s letter urges Halliday to “go on till” this “ecstasy of reduction with Minette” is “fulfilled,” but only if they can find in themselves no “living desire for positive creation” (383). Sadomasochism is for the doomed, not the living, and so is exclusively associated with the novel’s mortification phase. Minette herself can find no joy in her pregnancy; she seems to Gerald “so far in spirit from any childbearing” and says to him that she does not want the baby (68).While Birkin and Ursula’s arguments about love are part of the novel’s destructive phase—for they struggle to free themselves from “[i]mprison[ment] within a limited, false set of concepts”— their sensual exchanges are at the center of Lawrence’s revitalization effort (41). Several compositional strategies used in the sacralization phase have an inverse relation to those deployed in the destruction phase. Thus, while one mortification tactic is to link willful, self-conscious sex with headcentered forms of consciousness and communication, a key sacralization tactic is to link spontaneous, unselfconscious, mutually satisfying sex with the lower body’s modes of awareness. And while the destruction phase employs terms associated with mechanical and physical forces and phenomena, these terms are almost absent from the vivifying episodes—a fact overlooked by many critics.The one exception is the continued use of the language of electrical force, probably because of its widespread symbolic association with lightning and divine energy. In Apocalypse, Lawrence discusses the sacred symbolism of thunder and lightning and asserts that each has a creative and a destructive aspect: The grand Logos of the beginning was a thunderclap laughing throughout chaos, and causing the cosmos. But the Thunder, which is also the Almightly, and the Lightning, which is the Fiery Almighty, putting forth the first jet of life-flame—the fiery Logos— have both also their angry or sundering aspect. Thunder claps creative through space, Lightning darts in fecund fire: or the reverse, destructive. (98) The annihilating power of lightning had been emphasized in the portrayal of Gerald’s orgasmic force; its creative power is highlighted in the depictions of Birkin’s vital force. A third strategy is to associate this sacred-electrical discourse with both Eastern and Western mystical discourses. Lawrence may have been influenced by Richard Pryse, who in Apocalypse Unsealed uses the


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electricity metaphor to characterize kundalini energy as “living, conscious electricity, of incredible voltage” (11).44 Lawrence also associates electrical discourse with the Biblical expression “son of God,” which we saw had Kabbalistic mystical resonances in The Rainbow. A fourth strategy is to arrange the erotic exchanges to coincide roughly with the sequence of ritualistic actions that precede and makeup Tantric sex.45 Because the full powers of the body are portrayed in the revitalization phase, the yogic discourse is highlighted. Despite the novel’s overall championing of the organic over the mechanical, it is important to observe that an organic discourse is not deployed in the sex scenes involving Birkin and Ursula. This crucial point has been overlooked. The settings in which the erotic interplays take place are natural—mostly in the woods—but the language used to portray the exchanges does not refer to organic life. I believe that the absence of organic terms indicates that Lawrence was trying to show that the universal substance—what physicists might call the quantum field or matter–energy matrix—is fundamentally unified, intelligent, and alive and gives rise to both organic and inorganic phenomena. Thus, in “Mino” Birkin equates the cosmic forces that bind the universe to those which bind people in order to suggest that all these forces are fundamentally vital:“I do think . . . that the world is only held together by the mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between people—a bond” (152). Ursula’s reverie in “Sunday Evening” also reflects this view of the ultimate unity and aliveness of matter and energy, or body and spirit: “And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation of integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as well” (192). This formula is simultaneously Blakean, Kabbalistic, Hindu, pre-Socratic. Like the pre-Socratics, Lawrence images the matter–energy matrix as a kind of cosmic soup from which particular creatures are created and into which their vital components return after death. Creation is thus a process of giving form to the flexible, fluid, undifferentiated matter–energy substrate, and death is the disintegration of that created form. While a mechanical perspective denies life to the inorganic, Lawrence’s organic perspective asserts that both the organic and the inorganic are part of a cycle of cosmic life, the inorganic merely representing the decomposition/death phase of life. His organicism is simultaneously a cosmology, for it posits that the universe itself is an immense living organism made up of smaller living organisms. For him, the term “organic” indicates that a being or system of beings is living, singular, organized, developing, intelligent, purposive, sensitive, responsive, creative, self-equilibrating, and

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self-repairing. In an organic system, each part has a unique character and a unique role in its contribution to the functioning of the whole. The parts are organized in subsystems and systems, each with distinct yet interrelated cycles or rhythms.The interrelations between these subsystems are dynamic: changes in one subsystem effecting changes in others. The novel’s central metaphor for sacred connection is the star equilibrium. Birkin tells Ursula: “What I want is a strange conjunction with you—not meeting and mingling;—. . . but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:—as the stars balance each other” (148).The image represents a dynamic balance of the forces of attraction and repulsion. It suggests that a healthy relationship involves a balance of communion and independence.46 The use of an astrological metaphor reinforces the idea that numinous human relationships are manifestations of larger cosmic relationships.47 The description of Birkin and Ursula’s first erotic encounter is somewhat didactic, portraying what the interaction both is and is not. It involves Nirvanalike peace, freedom, stillness, and bliss and does not involve thought, desire, and will.48 Its main function is to introduce some of the sacred diction, to present a mildly sensual connection that is balanced but not fully eroticized, and to produce a mild trancelike state in the reader by combining the key terms in various ways: She clung nearer to him. He held her close, and kissed her softly, gently. It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and together, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss.To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness. (252) This encounter is not highly erotically charged, but the quiescent, satisfying embrace soon escalates to a dynamic sexual response. As they hold one another, Birkin’s “warm breath on her ears disturbed her again, kindled the old destructive fires. She cleaved to him, and he could feel his blood changing like quicksilver” (252).These are the old destructive fires of Dionysian ecstasy; they do not further the growth of the participants or their relationship. Earlier, Birkin had said that “the Dionysic ecstatic way” is “like going round in a squirrel cage” (251).The “Dionysic” way is problematic because it emphasizes the life of the body cut off from the mind. Like Nietzsche, Lawrence advocated a holistic approach that includes yet transcends—that is, integrates and overcomes—the dualism of


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Dionysian and Apollonian. Birkin curtails the kindling of his sexual desire, saying “But we’ll be still, shall we?” (252).The use of the subjunctive and the interrogative suggests that he is trying not to impose his will on her. “Excurse” is the chapter in which most of the sacred sexual encounters between Birkin and Ursula take place and in which Lawrence most vigorously tries to revitalize the reader’s consciousness. Perhaps too vigorously, for didactic descriptions often dominate passages in which subtler transformative devices would have been more effective.The chapter title suggests not only “out of the course” of conventional life but also “out of the curse” of Adam and Eve. It is a movement toward “paradise regained.”These scenes establish the novel’s positive erotic standard for numinous excursions— for sexual interplay conceived as a life-enhancing adventure. The first erotic scene involving Birkin and Ursula is another instance of a peaceful encounter that is not fully sexual. After their fight over the rings, “a hot passion of tenderness” for Ursula “filled his heart,” and as they embrace, he feels peace:“It was peace, just simple peace, as he stood folding her quietly there on the open lane. It was peace at last.The old, detestable world of tension had passed away at last, his soul was strong and at ease” (310). The tenderness in this scene resembles that in Lady Chatterley when Mellors, feeling compassion in his bowels, first soothes Connie.The reader learns that the hot passion of tenderness is not sexual passion, for Ursula “wished he were passionate, because in passion she was at home” (311).Tenderness is associated with a sense of spaciousness, of shared peaceful space, while sexual passion is linked to force:“this was so still and frail, as space is more frightening than force” (311). The tenderness that dispels the tension has a renovative effect.When the couple drive on, Birkin experiences a change in consciousness from head-centered to full-bodied: He drove on in a strange new wakefulness, the tension of his consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over, all his body awake with a simple, glimmering awareness, as if he had just come awake, like a thing that is born, like a bird when it comes out of an egg, into a new universe. (311–12) A similar hatching egg metaphor appears in the prelude to the first sexual coupling in Lady Chatterley. Ursula’s consciousness is also transfigured: “new eyes were opened in her soul” (312). Having gone through a rebirth process, she experiences the world as “unreal,” herself as “a strange, transcendent reality,” and Birkin as “a strange creature from another world” (312). It is a kind of “paradise regained” experience

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where the renewed Eden seems like “another world.” Unlike Gudrun’s mental superconsciousness, Birkin’s awakened consciousness is mainly body-based. It is important to notice that he can bring this somatic awareness to even a very modern activity like driving a car. Echoes of Genesis are sustained as the language of magic is introduced to express Ursula’s experience of Birkin as a Biblical son of God and of herself as a fortunate daughter of men: It was as if she were enchanted, and everything were metamorphosed. She recalled again the old magic of the Book of Genesis, where the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. And he was one of these, one of these strange creatures from the beyond, looking down at her, and seeing she was fair. (312) The positive connotation of magic in this passage indicates that Lawrence has transvalued magic, at least white magic. In this context, it is no longer associated with domination but with spontaneous sensuality and metanoia. Lawrence in effect suggests that old magic can be transformed into new mysticism.49 He may also be indicating that in the ancient world there was less of a distinction between what we would call magic and mysticism. Ancient magic was less subject to self-conscious and intellectual manipulation and was more spontaneous and body-centered.And yet, the very fact that the passage contains a literary allusion and a reference to memory (“She recalled again”) indicates that an intellectual, past-centered consciousness is operating alongside or in oscillation with a more affective, present-centered awareness.The allusive structure of the passage resembles the anal sex scene in Lady Chatterley when Connie compares herself and Mellors to Heloise and Abelard, but Ursula is perhaps less insistent than Connie. In short, Ursula’s consciousness is not totally anchored in her body. Moreover, it is ironic that Ursula, who has insisted on either male subservience or on absolute sexual equality, seems to revel in the implied superiority of Birkin, the godlike man who looks down on her. Her face is transfigured and is “upturned exactly like a flower, a fresh, luminous flower, glinting faintly golden with the dew of the first light” (313).This golden light, like the star metaphor, has been associated with her spirit, as when Birkin says “I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me—that golden light which is you—which you don’t know” (249).50 Once Birkin and Ursula have been transfigured, they enact the new mode of being, and the reader is offered a description of the “mysterious life-flow” that Ursula stimulates at the back of Birkin’s thighs (305).The reader may well link this “life-motion” to the passionate, dark electricity


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experienced by Gerald, but Ursula’s realization indicates that the life flow/motion is neither one of passion, nor of love, but a numinous energy associated with apotheosized humanity—what Yoga practitioners call “kundalini energy”: Unconsciously, with her sensitive finger-tips, she was tracing the backs of his thighs, following some mysterious life-flow there. She had discovered something, something more than wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It was the strange mystery of his lifemotion, there, at the back of the thighs, down the flanks. It was a strange reality of his being, the very stuff of being, there in the straight downflow of the thighs. It was here she discovered him one of the sons of God such as were in the beginning of the world, not a man, something other, something more. This was release at last. She had had lovers, she had known passion. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning. Her face was now one dazzle of released, golden light. (313) We have here the language of discovery and wonder that is so prevalent in the mystical passages in The Rainbow , yet here there is a greater degree of explanation and analysis.The detailing of the flow and direction of the life energy recalls Lady Chatterley.This specification of flow and direction suggests a kind of fluid organics—not mechanics—of the body. Doherty explains in “The Darkest Source” that in Tantric yoga—the Hindu and Buddhist art of sacred eroticism—there is “an elaborate rite of body stroking” that is practiced as a prelude to “rousing the ‘sleeping serpent’ ” (217). Ursula’s tracing of the back of Birkin’s thighs also recalls the Chinese drawing that traces the goose’s life flow; just as Ursula has a tactile knowledge of Birkin’s body, the Chinese have a kind of blood knowledge of the goose’s body—their somatic centers of consciousness and energy know the goose’s centers (89). Similarly, as Ursula traces Birkins thighs and loins,“a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself ” (313–14). The tracing has stimulated the flow of kundalini energy, which is stored at the base of the spine, in the seventh chakra. Perhaps because Lawrence was just beginning to experiment with a sacred discourse totally unfamiliar to the reader—that of Tantric yoga— he got caught up in having to explain more than show. The narrator presents Ursula’s intuitive realizations and literary allusions rather than

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her felt awareness: she discovers his “life-motion,” which she conceives as “the very stuff of being” and again thinks of him as a “son of God.” In short, the narrator offers the verbal knowledge that issues from the felt experience.A more effective sacralizing strategy might have been to present the feelings that occurred either during or after the encounter. Lawrence valued the shock power of an alien sacred discourse and yet felt a need to educate the reader about its significance. Here, his sacralizing and didactic impulses are at odds. It is important to observe that in their encounter Ursula releases Birkin’s energy and simply draws it into herself while Gudrun had willfully and hyperconsciously drawn in Gerald’s energy to form her rope of knowledge. What most distinguishes Ursula’s sexual exchange with Birkin from Gerald’s involvements with Gudrun and Minette is its balance.This sense of balance is indicated by the introduction of the terms “circuit” and “poles,” which recall Birkin’s description of vital sexual encounter as a “polarization” and “sex-circuit” (201), and by the peaceful, mutually enriching effect that is produced: She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction. (314) The explanatory nature of this passage is similar to that containing Birkin’s mythic account of the origins of sex: “The process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of sex. . . . There is only the pure duality of polarisation. . . . Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit” (201). But while an explanatory mode is appropriate for Birkin’s account, it is less effective when used to convey an actual sexual encounter. It seems that Lawrence was concerned that the reader make the connection between Birkin’s theory and the couple’s actions. It is one thing to carry over individual terms from one passage to the other; it is another to carry over explanatory and analytic structures. The rest of the passage describes the mutual flooding that renews both participants by jettisoning them into a new level of energy and awareness. Two key words—“flood” and “foundation”—appear in combination with various terms associated with sacred erotic experiences: ineffable, dark, deep, mysterious, potent, strange, marvellous, perfect, quick, still, glimmer, free. The language then becomes rather didactic when the narrator explains that the energy comes from a source


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deeper than the phallus: She closed her hands over the full, rounded body of his loins, as he stooped over her, she seemed to touch the quick of the mystery of darkness that was bodily him. . . . It was a perfect passing away for both of them, and at the same time the most intolerable accession into being, the marvellous fullness of immediate gratification, overwhelming, outflooding from the Source of the deepest life-force, the darkest, deepest, strangest life-source of the human body, at the back and base of the loins. . . . There were strange fountains of his body more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source.And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches. (315) Whereas Connie Chatterley’s erotic body is a churning sea, Birkin’s body is a flooding fountain. The didacticism in this passage again recalls the overly explanatory language in the unconvincing anal sex scene in Lady Chatterley, and here Ursula is almost as insistent as Connie. Ursula is not just feeling; she is also defining (“It was a perfect passing away . . . and . . . the most intolerable accession into being”), abstracting (“the quick of the mystery of darkness. . . . Source of the deepest lifeforce . . . strangest life-source”), comparing (“fountains of his body more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known”), and reconsidering (“She had thought there was no source deeper”). Although the earlier passage had linked the sons of God to “the old magic of the Book of Genesis,” the language in this passage is mystical, not magical: there is no talk of spells and glamor.This change might suggest that the old magic has been metamorphosed into modern mysticism, but the didacticism undermines the revitalizing effect that Lawrence is aiming at here.51 Another “son of God” experience soon follows, and the narrator offers a brief description of the exchange.The passage contains the mystical language of flooding, swooning, lapsing out, mystery, mystic surety, awe, and riches; moreover, the portrayal of their movements is concrete and vivid: Her arms closed round him again, her hands spread upon his shoulders, moving slowly there, moving slowly on his body, down his back slowly, with a strange recurrent, rhythmic motion, yet

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moving slowly down, pressing mysteriously over his loins, over his flanks. The sense of the awfulness of riches that could never be impaired flooded her mind like a swoon, a death in most marvellous possession, mystic-sure. She possessed him so utterly and intolerably, that she herself lapsed out. (316) In this passage, the word “possession” is transvalued: as Ursula possesses Birkin, she is possessed by the moment and so dispossesses (surrenders) herself. The unifying effect of the encounter is stressed by the repeated use of the plural pronoun:“they woke again from the pure swoon”;“they decided . . . to write their resignations from the world of work” (316). Although the decision is joint, Birkin, the wordsmith, controls the actual writing of the resignations. In resolving to leave their jobs, they shift their affiliation from the institutional–societal “they/them” to the intimate, sacred “we/us.”As they reenter their car and drive on, Ursula realizes that they belong to a divine realm, symbolized by darkness and fate, which simultaneously encompasses them and ensures their continuing relationship.This fate is “beautiful” and fully “accept[ed]” because it springs from human desire, which seeks out all forms of beauty (318). The narrator insists that their “mystic knowledge” is “full,” not partial, because its source is the entire body, but the didacticism of the previous erotic passages has probably undermined the reader’s belief in this assertion (318). In the episode that follows, the language of mysticism gives way to a blend of magic and mysticism.This blending indicates that the purely mystical mode of consciousness achieved through touch cannot be totally maintained when contact is ended.As Birkin drives, he is figured as having two modes of consciousness operating simultaneously.The primary mode is Egyptian, the secondary mode Greek; the latter taps the energy and awareness of the lower body, the former that of the body above the waist: He sat still like an Egyptian Pharaoh, driving the car. He felt as if he were seated in immemorial potency, like the great carven statues of real Egypt, as real and as fulfilled with subtle strength, as these are, with a vague inscrutable smile on the lips. He knew what it was to have the strange and magical current of force in his back and loins, and down his legs, force so perfect that it stayed him immobile, and left his face subtly, mindlessly smiling. He knew what it was to be awake and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind. And from this source he had a pure and magic control, magical, mystical, a force in darkness, like electricity. . . .


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Nothing more was said.They ran on in silence. But with a sort of second consciousness he steered the car towards a destination. For he had the free intelligence to direct his own ends. His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head. A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness. (318) The blatant and precise mapping of the historical references and explanations onto Birkin’s body undercuts the intended vivifying impact of the passage. By the time he wrote Lady Chatterley, Lawrence had evidently concluded that organic figures are generally more effective— because less logocentric and distracting—as revitalizing devices than are historical and literary analogies; in the later novel, the analogies have dropped out of nearly all the erotic encounters (with the notable exception of the anal sex scene). The Egyptian consciousness corresponds to the first three chakras (sacrum, genitals, navel), the Greek consciousness to the last four (heart, throat, forehead, crown).52 In Lawrence’s simplified version of the chakras in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, the Egyptian mode refers to the lower or “first plane of the unconscious,” and the Greek to the upper or “second plane of the unconscious.”These planes are also called “fields of consciousness.” Even when Birkin stops the car and walks into a “lighted, published place,” he “remained dark and magic, the living silence seemed the body of reality in him, subtle, potent, indiscoverable” (319). Ursula experiences him as “the being never to be revealed, awful in its potency, mystic and real” (319). It is the blending of the Greek and Egyptian forms of consciousness that explains the blending of “magic” and “mystic.” Birkin’s uninterpretable and ineffable state of being enables her to remain similarly singular, mysterious,“liberated” and “fulfilled” (319). But Ursula’s subsequent reverie indicates that the altered state of consciousness that she is experiencing is not the ultimate state, for that is only achieved in actual darkness and through touch: She would have to touch him.To speak, to see, was nothing. It was a travesty to look and to comprehend the man there. Darkness and silence must fall perfectly on her, then she could know mystically, in unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing. (319)

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For Ursula to look at Birkin is a “travesty” because the ultimate knowledge is a tactile nonknowledge that offers nonverbal and nonvisual surety, not subject to the distortions of language and appearance. It is purely mystical knowledge (beyond knowledge) without the tincture of magical awareness, that is, of awareness shaped by will or intellect. But the very abstractness of this passage—“It was a travesty. . . . She must lightly, mindlessly connect, have the knowledge which is death of knowledge”— demontrates that Ursula does not presently possess the knowledge she values.Then, as she sits next to Birkin in the car, she too acquires a mode of consciousness resembling Birkin’s Egyptian mode; and when they simultaneously possess this sensual awareness, they embody the star metaphor:“She sat in a fullness and a pure potency that was like apathy, mindless and immobile. She was next to him, and hung in a pure rest, as a star is hung, balanced unthinkably” (319). Since it is the potency that precedes passionate action, it is apathetic; and since it is the potentiality of desire, it contains expectancy, which will eventually produce action. This expectancy or anticipation, which was the quality possessed by the medieval Brangwens in The Rainbow (9), is indicated by the use of the subjunctive and the infinitive in the following passage: Still there remained a dark lambency of anticipation. She would touch him.With perfect fine finger-tips of reality she would touch the reality in him, the suave, pure, untranslateable reality of his loins of darkness. To touch, mindlessly in darkness to come in pure touching upon the living reality of him, his suave perfect loins and thighs of darkness, this was her sustaining anticipation. And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her darkly, with the fulness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic nodality of physical being. They would give each other this star-equilibrium which alone is freedom. (319) It is touch that shifts consciousness from mystical–magical to purely mystical, from “the magical steadfastness of suspense” associated with expectancy to the “pure mystic nodality of physical being” and the “starequilibrium” associated with contact.Thus, the Egyptian mode is associated with both the purely mystical and the mixed magical–mystical modes. And yet the supposed shift to a mystical mode is again undermined by the passage’s exceeding abstractness.


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The couple’s relationship is consummated in Sherwood Forest in “pure night, with shadows of trees like realities of other, nightly being” (320).53 The numinous presence of the trees recalls several erotic episodes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ursula and Birkin become totally unselfconscious and experience each other through their feeling bodies: Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness. She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of the mystic, palpable, real otherness. (320) An oscillation of giving and accepting is stressed. And revelation is now neither ocularcentric, nor logocentric; it is purely felt, purely mystical. Each has been absorbed by the night but not by each other—they meet through touch. But only when the couple are huddled together on the Noahlike ship from Dover to Ostend does Birkin experience “utter and absolute peace” and Ursula’s heart glow with “the effulgence of a paradise unknown and unrealised” (388). The final sex scene involving Birkin and Ursula suggests that even degrading eroticism has its value. Degradation is linked to shamelessness, bestiality, unrestraint. It is an affirmation of the animal side of human nature and is degrading in the sense that it taps a pre-social form of consciousness and energy—a grade below a socialized human consciousness.The scene’s language recalls the honeymoon episode between Will and Anna in The Rainbow and the anal sex episode in Lady Chatterley.The passage presents Ursula’s reflections on one or more degrading sexual encounters that they have already experienced or that they might experience in the future: They might do as they liked—this she realized as she went to sleep. How could anything that gave one satisfaction be excluded? What

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was degrading?—Who cared? Degrading things were real, with a different reality. And he was so unabashed and unrestrained.Wasn’t it rather horrible, a man who could be so soulful and spiritual, now to be so—she balked at her own thoughts and memories: then she added—so bestial? So bestial, they two!—so degraded! She winced.—But after all, why not? She exulted as well. Why not be bestial, and go the whole round of experience? She exulted in it. She was bestial. How good it was to be really shameful! There would be no shameful things she had not experienced.—Yet she was unabashed, she was herself.Why not?—She was free, when she knew everything, and no dark shameful things were denied her. (413) It is significant that the passage emphasizes the bestial, not the destructive, as satisfying.“[T]he whole round of experience” and the “dark shameful things” do not include the annihilating sexuality that culminates in death, although this sadomasochism clearly gave Gerald and Gudrun some satisfaction. Given the absence of any terms referring to the mechanical or the destructive, the bestial here is aligned with the creative side of the life force. This creative side may, however, include some destructive elements, since the logic of the novel has been to distinguish two types of destruction: one which negates life, and one which ultimately serves creative, positive living. But the passage is more rhetorical than evocative: it focuses on Ursula’s judgments, questions, and assertions, rather than on her feelings. We have seen that much of the dramatic ineffectiveness of the sex scenes in the sacralizing phase is due to the sustained use of abstract, definitional, analytical, explanatory, and rhetorical language. Rather than narrating Ursula and Birkin’s feelings, the narrator presents the thoughts engendered by those feelings. In the vivifying passages in Lady Chatterley and in The Rainbow we saw that abstract terms are used sparingly and are often dispersed among a variety of concrete descriptors and figures. In Women in Love, in contrast, concreteness and specificity are at a minimum, and while these qualities are linked conceptually to revitalization, they are actually more frequent in the mortification passages. It is as if the very strength and abundance of Lawrence’s fury could not but pour itself out into concrete, specific descriptions that belied any conceptual linkage to abstraction.The very vividness of the destructive scenes may even be counterproductive since the reader may find them luridly alive and attractive. On the other hand, despite the theoretical basis for associating revitalization with concreteness, Lawrence’s weakened faith in the positive transformation of the reader could not engender the kind or quality


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of energy necessary for producing concrete, specific passages with vivifying effects. Instead, he had to resort to forcing the descriptions and using didactic language to compensate for the lack of positive, creative energy. He was also grappling with how to use obscure sacred discourses, knowing that their very obscurity could both aid and hinder his vitalizing aim. In The Rainbow, a better balance of obscurity and familiarity was reached because while Kabbalah draws on familiar Biblical expressions, it uses them in startlingly strange ways. In writing Women in Love, Lawrence seemed to realize that the yogic discourse he had selected ran the risk of being merely intellectually baffling, rather than emotionally engaging, and so he chose to explain his terms.This explanatory act, while increasing the comprehensibility and potential impact of the terms, also produced the countereffect of overloading the text with logocentric structures.

CHAPTER

FIVE

The Implosion of the Transformative Pattern in The Plumed Serpent

I. Initiation and Rananim In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence deals more explicitly and insistently with the theme of initiation than in any of his other novels, and it is obvious that the reader is now in the position of a potential initiate. It is not simply ironic that this novel should prove to be one of his most debated works in terms of its power to touch, persuade or transform the reader.1 While Lawrence eventually himself came to see the novel’s “leader-cum-follower” theme as a “bore,” and to realize he was “sort of sick of all forms of militarism and militantism,” we will see that the novel also fails for reasons beyond its militant, authoritarian, and racialist strains.2 Despite Lawrence’s enthusiasm about the novel as he was writing it, my analysis shows that the novel’s technical problems reveal his frequent attempts to impose a didactic vision on the narrative.3 We have seen this conflict between Lawrence’s pedantic and vivifying impulses in his earlier novels, but in this work the ideological imperative too often drives and distorts narrative development. In trying too overtly to control the representation of his religious ideology and its effects on the characters and the reader, Lawrence makes significant literary errors of commission and omission: he manufactures implausible and distorted characters and situations, and refrains from presenting perspectival details that would make these implausibilities and distortions more evident to the reader.4 These latter techniques reveal a desire, conscious or unconscious, to cover up the untenable and unpersuasive features of the novel. The novel’s technical problems not only disclose the difficulties that were

The Implosion of the Transformative Pattern

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always inherent in Lawrence’s initiatory aims, but they also significantly undermine any authorial attempt to transform the reader. I focus on the weaknesses in the novel’s sacralization phase since the passages dealing with the portrayal of the Quetzalcoatl rituals—meditations, dances, ceremonies, hymns—are the most innovative, flawed, and disturbing in the book. Though this chapter will focus on artistic, characterological, and political problems in the revitalization phase, I want to emphasize that the novel still possesses—for me and for other readers—a rare power, fascination, and beauty. This is due in part to the sheer audacity and originality of Lawrence’s intent, scope, and design and to his masterful depiction of some aspects of Kate’s life and of Mexican society and landscape. Lawrence’s attempt to imagine and portray an entire religious movement is impressive. And though he often distorts Mexico and Mexicans, the total effect of the novel is to create a respect, even an admiration, for the mystery and magic of the land and many of its peoples. Moreover, Lawrence is a notable pioneer in suggesting that a creative fusion of races, cultures, and religions may hold real promise for the revitalization and evolution of humanity. Finally, there can be no doubt that many scenes not directly related to the Quetzalcoatl movement—like the bullfight in Chapter I and the loading of the bull onto the boat in Chapter XXVII—are masterfully portrayed. We have seen that in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover the principal sacred initiation is a private, sexual one; and it is the relationship itself that serves as the initiator for the participants. In theory, at least, the relationship is not predetermined but discovered; it unfolds as the participants act and react spontaneously to each other, allowing their passions to be their guides.There is no external authority that the couple must to conform to; rather, sacred desire and transcendent peace are the sole authorities. In The Plumed Serpent, however, initiation takes on a different character: that of a collective initiation rite in which the steps are prescribed and the goal foreknown. The participants pass through a sequence of ready-made, well-defined rites that culminate not only in sacred experiences of a certain character but also in a particular set of beliefs, cosmological and metaphysical.The initiator is a single person— Don Ramon—and the means of initiation are songs, dances, and ceremonies that he has devised.5 Most of these rites are public; a few are semiprivate; and all have predefined forms with virtually no room for individual variation and spontaneous innovation. In fact, conformity rather than spontaneity—as well as the submergence of the individual in the collective—is required for such rites to work. These rites may have been partially spontaneous creations of Ramon—though many seem

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labored and overly learned—but they are certainly not the spontaneous inventions of the people. Indeed, the people must conform, not create; they must follow Ramon’s rhythms, not their own.6 This authoritarianism is latent in Lawrence’s idea of natural aristocracy, which posits that some individuals have deeper or greater souls than others, and that the lesser should freely choose to follow the spiritual wisdom of the greater.7 Thus, while Lawrence insists that every individual follow his or her own deepest impulses, he also wants individuals to defer to their superior when there is a conflict of impulses. It is hard to see the difference between this approach and more normative forms of authoritarianism. Don Ramon is supposedly the great man who has already discovered the essential truths; it is merely a matter of disclosing these truths, a few at a time, to the people, Kate and the reader. Even though Lawrence is opposed to the bullying will, he, as author, compels Kate and many of the Mexican people to accept Ramon’s ideology. Despite Kate’s significant reservations, she implausibly comes to support many of the aims of the Quetzalcoatl movement and learns to take orders from Cipriano, surrendering her orgasm and nearly sacrificing her individuality. And despite Ramon’s minimal and contrived attempts to “convert” the Indian populations, a large segment implausibly come to participate enthusiastically in the bloody events of the movement. Most readers probably will be unpersuaded by Kate’s conversion and by the movement’s mass appeal and will likely be repulsed by the quasifascistic propaganda. Notwithstanding recent scholarship that shows that Lawrence is explicitly opposed to Fascism, and that in an early version of the novel Cipriano criticizes Fascism as “a bully movement,” most reviewers are still repelled by the power politics of the novel and by the public executions led by Cipriano and sanctioned by Ramon.8 Of course, it could be argued that the initiatory structures in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley have a didactic function similar to Don Ramon’s rituals. But I have tried to show, especially in the case of the first two novels, that the subtlety, complexity, and selfcritique in these novels keeps them from being initiatory in the worst sense: rigidly or narrowly propagandistic. The acquiescence of the other characters to Don Ramon’s scheme probably reflects Lawrence’s attempt to create in literature what he failed to create in life: a community of individuals who acknowledged him as their permanent religious leader. Lawrence wrote The Plumed Serpent during three visits to Mexico between March 1923 and March 1925.The writing took a great deal out of him, and he must have known that his health would not hold out long enough for him to realize his utopian


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Rananim. Indeed, shortly after completing the novel in February 1925, he collapsed and nearly died.9 Lawrence’s “quest for Rananim” began during World War I when his disillusionment with Europe impelled him to conceive of a utopia of friends.10 He seems to have first thought of the idea during a Christmas party in 1914: joining him and Frieda at their Chesham cottage were Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Gordon and Beatrice Campbell, Mark Gertler and S. S. Koteliansky. In a January 3, 1915 letter to Koteliansky, which seems to follow up on a conversation that occurred at the party, Lawrence asks, “What about Rananim? Oh, but, we are going. We are going to found an Order of the Knights of Rananim. The motto is ‘Fier’ [‘Proud’]—or the Latin equivalent.”11 Two weeks later, Lawrence writes to Willie Hopkin that he wants to establish a quasi-communist colony: I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go, and some real decency. It is to be . . . a community which is established upon the assumption of goodness in the members.12 Over the years, he changed the desired location from a remote island to England to Florida to New Mexico.13 In a January 18, 1915 letter to E. M. Forster, Lawrence stresses that he wants a classless community in which members fulfill their desires through their relationships with other members: In my Island, I wanted people to come without class or money, sacrificing nothing, but each coming with all his desires, yet knowing that his life is but a tiny section of a Whole: so that he shall fulfil his life in relation to the Whole. I wanted a real community, not built out of abstinence or equality, but out of many fulfilled individualities seeking greater fulfilment.14 While his idea emphasizes both individuality and interdependence, it was clear to many of his friends that he wanted to be the group’s spiritual leader, and most concluded that what he really wanted was absolute allegiance. During the time when he was trying to recruit Bertrand Russell to Rananim, he wrote that “I don’t believe in democratic control”; rather, “[t]here must be an elected aristocracy” in which the men elect a “Dictator” to “govern the industrial side of life” and the women elect

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a “woman Dictator” to “govern the domestic side.”15 Though Russell was asked to be Rananim’s president, he surely sensed that Lawrence wanted to be its poet-prophet and probably its philosopher-king. Ultimately, Russell “dismissed Lawrence’s ideas as morbid rubbish.”16 Koteliansky, a Russian-born translator, was one of Lawrence’s few enduring friends who maintained a lasting interest in Rananim, and Lawrence shared his utopian hopes and frustrations with him until he finally abandoned his dream in 1926. On January 4, 1926, Lawrence wrote Koteliansky that “That Rananim of ours, it has sunk out of sight.”17 In The Plumed Serpent, the idea of sacred knowledge is really more associated with dogma than with mystery. In fact, the fate of the word “dogma” illustrates what seems to have happened to Lawrence’s idea of religious mystery. In the fourth century,“dogma” referred to “the hidden, secret traditions of the Church, which could only be understood mystically and expressed symbolically.”18 But in the West, the word has “come to mean a body of opinion, categorically and authoritatively stated.”19 That is, the mystery of numinous experience has become petrified in the legalisms of religious doctrine.The mystic’s individual understanding of divinity is replaced by the theologian’s collective prescriptions and proscriptions. Dogma has in effect become its opposite: kerygma. Similarly, in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence often converts sacred mystery into religious doctrine.The evocative indirections of authentic sacred art are frequently set aside for the direct assertions of propagandistic prophecy—a prophecy too enamored with violence and vengeance. In our analyses of The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley, we have seen that Lawrence consistently associates a reflexive, insistent consciousness with destructiveness, but in this novel self-conscious willfulness dominates what is now harder to call “the sacralization phase.” Few of Don Ramon’s hymns and ceremonies are spontaneously creative or persuasive.Though some of these religious forms represent impressive creative fusions of Indian and European dispensations, they will probably strike readers as ideologically driven.20 While the earlier novels contain doctrinal and even propagandistic elements, these elements are usually assigned to the dialogue or inner monologues of individual characters, like Birkin, who espouse aspects of Lawrence’s religious philosophy. And though didactic elements can be found in the sex scenes involving Birkin and Ursula, it was clear that the overall structure of Women in Love resists reduction to dogmatic formulations. Not so with The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence always faced the challenge of finding a way to maintain an attitude of openness and discovery toward themes he had already worked on. It was his ultimate challenge


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to keep his obsessions fresh and ever changing.Yet it seems that the more convinced he became of the validity of spontaneous body-based religious experience, the less innovative he was in representing such experiences. The evocative power of The Rainbow is due in part to the fact that Lawrence is still very much in a discovery mode.That novel represents a fine blend of spontaneous writing and crafted rewriting, and maintains a satisfying balance between numinous descriptions and narratorial explanations. Lawrence’s belief in the transformative power of his own writing had yet to be weakened by his traumatic experience of the war, and that optimism freed up his positive creative energies.21 In contrast, The Plumed Serpent emerges as much from Lawrence’s frustrated fantasies of power as from fresh feelings and insights. It is, in part, a projection of his thwarted desire to establish Rananim and reveals just how profound and unrelenting was his own desire to assert religious authority. II. The Breakdown of the Initiatory Pattern Although the passages depicting the private rituals that Ramon, Cipriano,and Kate perform are meant to revitalize the reader,the avoidance of psychonarration and the overreliance on didacticism and dialogue generally undermine Lawrence’s transformative intention. It is especially important for these scenes to be effective because Lawrence has to persuade the reader that in them the Quetzalcoatl leadership is undergoing a believable process of deification. Western readers are not used to thinking of ordinary human beings becoming gods, and so Lawrence must be especially convincing in constructing these scenes. One scene represents the meditative prayer in which Ramon supposedly makes contact with his divine powers. But the narrator offers only a sparse and external treatment of Ramon’s consciousness, and such superficial treatment can be expected to have little or no transformative impact: He took off his clothes, and in the darkness thrust his clenched fists upwards above his head, in a terrible tension of stretched, upright prayer. In his eyes was only darkness, and slowly the darkness revolved in his brain, too, till he was mindless. Only a powerful will stretched itself and quivered from his spine in an immense tension of prayer. Stretched the invisible bow of the body in the darkness with inhuman tension, erect, till the arrows of the soul, mindless, shot to the mark, and the prayer reached its goal.

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Then suddenly, the clenched and quivering arms dropped, the body relaxed into softness.The man had reached his strength again. He had broken the cords of the world, and was free in the other strength. (169) The positioning of the body is given as much weight as the experience. The motion of the will is the main internal activity, and the arrow metaphor is striking but not elaborately developed.The tension of the will parallels the tension of the body but reveals little emotional content.The revolving darkness in the brain indicates the whirling energy and consciousness that Lawrence associates with the swirling motion of kundalini energy in the chakras. What is remarkable about the passage is that Ramon’s movements mime phallic arousal, tumescence, tension, and ejaculation, suggesting that the prayer is a kind of sexual offering to the deity. The narration of another prayer is somewhat more effective because the focus is internal and the language more figurative. Three water metaphors—fountain, wave, washing—describe the flooding and purifying impact of the passionate prayer on Ramon’s mind and body: And tense like the gush of a soundless fountain, he thrust up and reached down in the invisible dark, convulsed with passion.Till the black waves began to wash over his consciousness, over his mind, waves of darkness broke over his memory, over his being, like an incoming tide, till at last it was full tide, and he trembled, and fell to rest. Invisible in the darkness, he stood soft and relaxed, staring with wide eyes at the dark, and feeling the dark fecundity of the inner tide washing over his heart, over his belly, his mind dissolved away in the greater, dark mind, which is undisturbed by thoughts. He covered his face with his hands, and stood still, in pure unconsciousness, neither hearing nor feeling nor knowing, like a dark sea-weed deep in the sea.With no Time and no World, in the deeps that are timeless and worldless. (193) The image of a tensed body surging upward like a fountain is indeed striking and again suggests the pulsating action of an orgasmic phallus. We also saw the body figured as a fountain in The Rainbow (121) and Women in Love (314). In the second sentence, the action of the waves is effectively imitated in the oscillation between short and long phrases; this type of phrasal oscillation is one of Lawrence’s standard devices for suggesting wavelike movements of passion.The remaining sentences are


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more simply descriptive and explanatory and have less figurative density. A similar set of metaphors is used to describe Connie’s oceanic womb in Lady Chatterley. What makes both of these prayer scenes less than fully compelling is the fact that the receiver of Ramon’s prayer—the one to whom he is relating—is not palpably present. Ramon’s “partner” is the transcendent God, the deity beyond form, beyond the world.This transcendent deity seems more like an absence than a presence and so the scenes have a narcissistic, solipsistic or masturbatory quality. In contrast, in Women in Love, Birkin also has a religious experience in solitude, but he achieves this experience through relationship with the God immanent in concrete living beings (plants). Representations of the manifest God are more tangible and vivifying than are representations of the transcendent God. An excellent opportunity for Lawrence to demonstrate Cipriano’s supposedly deified consciousness and to revitalize the reader is during Cipriano’s private initiation by Ramon, but the scene is dominated by dialogue, and the account of Cipriano’s consciousness is abbreviated.The scene has homoerotic overtones, but both Cipriano’s and Ramon’s felt experiences of physical intimacy are largely elided. Most of the initiation is an interrogation, with Ramon questioning and Cipriano answering: “ ‘Cipriano?’. . .‘Yes.’. . .‘Is it dark?’. . .‘It is dark?’. . .‘Who lives?’. . . ‘I.’. . .‘Is it dark?’. . .‘No, my Lord.’. . .‘Is it perfect?’. . .‘It is perfect.’. . .‘Who lives?’. . .‘Who—!’ ” (367–8).22 We have stressed that Lawrence believed that dialogue was useful for clarifying and articulating a deep felt experience, but not for evoking feeling itself.The descriptions of Ramon’s actions (his pressing and binding of Cipriano’s body) are brief and external, and the psychonarrations of Cipriano are even briefer. It is as if the focus on formal ritual has compelled Lawrence to focus on outer form.The scene may be intriguing to the reader’s mind but is not likely to touch his or her heart. None of the portrayals of Cipriano’s consciousness have much figural density; rather, the focus is on a series of circles of sleep or darkness, recalling the rotating darkness of Ramon’s brain during his prayer: And slowly the darkness began to move upon a centre in Cipriano’s consciousness, to a centre that plunges into the bottomless depth, like sleep. . . . In Cipriano, another circle of darkness had started slowly to revolve, from his heart. It swung in widening rounds, like a greater sleep. . . .

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And Cipriano began to feel as if his mind, his head were melting away in the darkness, like a pearl in black wine, the other circle of sleep began to swing, vast. And he was a man without a head, moving like a dark wind over the face of the dark waters. . . . The last circle was sweeping round, and the breath upon the waters was sinking into the waters. . . . (367–8) Striking figures—pearl, black wine, dark wind, headless man—only occur in the penultimate section. The fact that dialogue intervenes between these psychonarrations further weakens their accumulative affective impact and potential transformative power. It is noteworthy that when Cipriano’s mind is extinguished, his body becomes like the Spirit of God (“dark wind”) that hovers over the face of the deep in Genesis; that is, he becomes an incarnation of divinity, a Son of God. Another passage in which the narrator claims that Cipriano gains godly power involves “the dance of the two warriors,” but the focus of the first two paragraphs is on the outer movements of Cipriano’s body, not on his inner state: he circles, crouches and leaps “like a panther,” and swerves along the ground “as invisible as a lynx” (365). Moreover, though the dance is supposed to be a duel and should therefore offer a sense of profound interchange—of the kind seen in the “Gladiatorial” chapter of Women in Love—little attention is given to Cipriano’s opponent. Rather, the opponent’s presence is only directly mentioned in the clause “the opponent swerved under,” and the only other allusion occurs in the brief phrases “clash of shields, parting again”; no other actions are described, and no states of mind are presented (365). The point of view is not expansive; it is self-enclosed. The third paragraph describing the dance does portray Cipriano’s inner sense of strength but in two sentences lacking in poetic power. The first, short sentence summarizes what was probably a long sequence of feelings and sensations: “And as the dance went on, Cipriano felt his strength increase and surge inside him” (365). We have seen that summaries of events and emotions are usually not effective revitalization devices. The second sentence merely depicts a static, terminal feeling: “When all his limbs were glistening with sweat, and his spirit was at last satisfied, he was at once tired and surcharged with extraordinary power” (365). Lawrence thus gives more attention to the static than to the dynamic dimension of Cipriano’s feelings.We have seen that representations of stasis are generally effective only after extensive treatment of the dynamic phase; in that way, the reader can vicariously experience a sense of rest or release. Moreover, the three clauses making up this sentence have simple predicates that lack vividness.


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Not only does the narrator occlude Cipriano’s opponent, he also veils the responses of other soldiers; that is, the narrator offers Cipriano’s experience of his power over his men rather than providing their experiences directly.This secondhand portrayal of experience would probably strike many readers as presumptive and unpersuasive: he felt the black mystery of power go out of him over all his soldiers.And he sat there imperturbable, in silence, holding all those black-eyed men in the splendour of his own, silent self. His own dark consciousness seemed to radiate through their flesh and their bones, they were conscious, not through themselves but through him . . . they got their splendour from his power. (365) Lawrence’s refusal to enter the consciousness of even one soldier adds to the implausibility of the scene and diminishes its transformative potential. Moreover, the two categoricals—“power . . . over all his soldiers,” “holding all those black-eyed men” (emphasis mine)—further intensify the episode’s lack of believability. The private initiation of Kate at the end of Chapter XXIV also lacks plausibility and transformative power. This chapter is short—only eight pages—for good reason: in it Lawrence has to quickly finesse Kate’s transition from a lukewarm lover of Cipriano, and a skeptic toward the Quetzalcoatl movement, to an enthusiastic lover and relatively strong supporter of Ramon and Cipriano.23 Even more improbably, Kate becomes “Malintzi,” “the bride of Huitzilopochtli” (392). The chapter tends to rely on strident assertion rather than on dramatic and emotive detail in its strained attempt to convince the reader. It opens with Kate’s thought that even though Ramon and Cipriano exhibited “terrible will” in their carrying out of the executions, they “no doubt were right for themselves, for their people and country” (387). Kate’s disturbingly contrived interior monologue should signal readers that the events to be depicted in the rest of the chapter are likely to be equally unbelievable.24 Kate attempts to justify the men’s assertion of will in her reverie about God’s Will: The Will of God! She began to understand that once fearsome phrase. At the centre of all things, a dark, momentous Will sending out its terrific rays and vibrations, like some vast octopus.And at the other end of the vibration, men, created men, erect in the dark potency, answering Will with will, like gods or demons. (387) Here, sacred experience is figured as the interchange between wills, while in earlier works Lawrence had consistently associated the

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communion of wills with a pseudomysticism masking destructive impulses. In a 1919 essay on Edgar Allan Poe that appears in The Symbolic Meaning, Lawrence explicitly repudiates the linkage of God and Will because for him will implies mechanistic fixity and power: If God is a great will, then the universe is a great machine, for the will is a fixed principle. But God is not a will. God is a mystery, from which creation mysteriously proceeds. So is the self a unit of creative mystery. But the will is the greatest of all control-principles, the greatest machine-principle. (Studies in Classic American Literature 231) We saw a similar linkage of divine Will and the machine principle in Women in Love (227–8). The deification of will in The Plumed Serpent, despite the attempt to distinguish between personal and impersonal will, is a significant factor in the novel’s attempted justification of calculated violence. It is no longer an issue of having to justify spontaneous interpersonal violence, as it was in The Rainbow and Women in Love. In The Plumed Serpent, premeditated, collective militancy is presented as a divinely sanctioned, defensive response: “Lay forcible hands on nothing, only be ready to resist, if forcible hands should be laid on you. . . . Fight for the vulnerable unfolding of life. But for that, fight never to yield” (361). Cipriano’s military exploits often exhibit unrestrained malice and vengeance. Some critics have suggested that Lawrence implicitly condemns Cipriano’s militarism, pointing out that the narrator says “there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror” (420).25 But the novel also attempts to sacralize horror: when Kate admits to Cipriano that she feels “a bit of horror” toward him, he says,“Get used to it that there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life. . . . The bit of horror is like the sesame seed in the nougat, it gives the sharp wild flavour. It is good to have it there” (235–6). In an earlier version of the novel, Cipriano pledges himself to the good, but even that pledge did not prevent him from conducting the ruthless public executions.26 At the same time that Lawrence has Kate justify will as a response to the divine, he also has her prettify it when she insists that Cipriano’s “Will” is just fine because it is really only the “instrument” and “armour” of his “Wish”—that is, it is a justifiable means for manifesting and protecting his divine desire (391). Before this passage, will had been consistently associated with bullying, fixed ideas and ideals, and Christian love (73–4, 156). But now the reader is asked to believe that Kate’s new view of will and of Cipriano is largely engendered by Cipriano’s


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“dazzling, childish” eyes and his “strangely young, vulnerable” and “sensitive” appearance as he implores her in Spanish to “Come and put on the green dress. I cannot be the Living Huitzilopochtli, without a bride. I cannot be it, Malintzi!” (391). Kate’s transformed perspective on Cipriano is presented in four short paragraphs that are dramatically unpersuasive: the first describes his eyes, the second presents his request, the third meditates on his boyish vulnerability and fiery wish, and the fourth depicts her sense of being disconcerted by his vulnerability. This new appearance of vulnerability and sensitivity is somehow supposed to explain away his willfulness, violence and vengeance and to make him a worthy partner. Moreover, it is supposed to convince Kate to don the mask of goddess. It is as if Cipriano’s revelation of his own humanity somehow justifies Kate in her pseudo-assumption of divinity. Kate’s assumption of the role of Malintzi occurs later that night as she sits on the throne next to the Huitzilopochtli’s throne. Again, we get a talky and analytic, rather than a felt, account of her reaction to Cipriano: “Strange how naive he was! He was not like Ramon, rather ponderous and deliberate in his ceremonials. Cipriano, in his own little deeds to-night with her, was naive as a child. . . . Ah, God. . . . There are more ways than one of becoming like a little child” (393). A similar episode occurs in Lady Chatterley when Connie uses exclamatory phrases to praise the beauty of Mellors’s body, but that scene has been preceded by numerous concrete and vivid representations of their lovemaking, so the exclamations are more believable. In Women in Love, in contrast, we saw that Gerald regresses to a childish state and treats Gudrun as a mother figure. In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence wants readers to experience Cipriano as refreshingly childlike and not as regressively childish, but the scene does not produce this effect.27 Rather, readers are simply told that Kate herself comes to feel “like a girl in her first adolescence” and to think: The Living Huitzilopochtli! Ah, easily he was the Living Huitzilopochtli. More than anything. More than Cipriano, more than a male man, he was the living Huitzilopochtli.And she was the goddess bride, Malintzi of the green dress. Ah, yes, it was childish. But it was actually so. (393) The representation of Kate’s conversion experience is inauthentic. The narrator focuses on the discursive content of her consciousness: we get her thoughts, or at best her verbalized emotions, but not her deep, inarticulate feelings. It is as if Lawrence knew, consciously or unconsciously,

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that if he tried to misrepresent her feelings, the sleight of hand would be even more obvious and annoying to the reader. Kate’s transformation seems even more implausible when we consider that her real attraction is to Ramon, with whom she was willing to die:“she didn’t mind dying so long as she died with that man [Ramon]” (292). It is striking that immediately after her acknowledgment of the deep bond with Ramon, she agrees to marry Cipriano. It is also revealing that at the beginning of “Marriage by Quetzalcoatl,” Kate “let her soul sink again into the lovely elusiveness where everything is possible, even that oneself is elusive among the gods” (325–6). Lawrence has to make Kate feel that everything is possible in order to justify her decision to marry Cipriano. Perhaps her earlier despair has been converted into unrealistic hope. In any case, her thoughts of elusiveness seem created by Lawrence’s evasiveness, but readers are likely to remain unpersuaded that Kate’s actual thoughts have been truly represented. It is also significant that the marriage ceremony focuses on Ramon’s instructions to the bride and groom and that no account is given of either Kate’s or Cipriano’s feelings during the ceremony—they merely listen to and sometimes repeat Ramon’s words. Again, talk rules where impassioned psychonarrative should be; and scripted action replaces spontaneity. Kate’s very need to become a goddess does not emerge from her own spontaneous desire but from Ramon’s insistence that there be no “womanless gods”; she is pressured into fulfilling his script (234). Even after supposedly experiencing Cipriano as Huitzilopochtli, Kate recognizes that “without Ramon,” Cipriano is “just an instrument, and not ultimately interesting to her” (408). Although Kate’s “apotheosis” as Malintzi is unconvincing, Lawrence certainly deserves praise for adding a positive goddess figure to the Indian pantheon.28 It is also commendable that he affirmed the salvific potential of interracial marriage at a time when such an alliance would have been roundly condemned in Europe and America.29 The narrative form that presents the sexual rite in which Kate gives up some of her orgasmic satisfaction also reveals Lawrence fabricating Kate’s thoughts and failing to construct a vibrant scene. Instead of getting the psychonarration of a particular erotic encounter, the reader gets Kate’s ruminations about her new philosophy of female sexuality, which stresses “positive passivity” (421).The passage is set up as a summary of her changing views toward sex, all of which are brought about by an undramatized and improbable submission to Cipriano: she comes to accept Cipriano’s opposition to “the curious irritant quality of talk” and realizes that “all her old love had been frictional, charged with the fire of irritation and the spasms of frictional voluptuousness”; and she finally accepts his


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repudiation of her “seething, frictional, ecstatic Aphrodite . . . the seething electric female ecstasy . . . the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of the foam” in favor of “the new, soft, heavy, hot flow, when she was like a fountain gushing noiseless and with urgent softness from the volcanic deeps” (421–2).This latter form of sexual experience is further described as “leaving her soft and powerfully potent, so soft, yet so powerful, like the hots springs of water that gushed up so noiseless, so soft, yet so powerful, with a sort of secret potency” (422).The focus is on comparing and distinguishing these two types of female sexual response, presumably clitoral and vaginal orgasms. Given the radical and offensive call for women to abandon clitoral orgasm, the onus was on Lawrence to demonstrate dramatically why and how a vaginal orgasmic response is indeed superior. Again, he avoids detailing what he cannot persuasively present, probably because at some deep intuitive level he knew he was projecting his wishes rather than realizing his characters.30 Instead, the reader receives a synopsis of the couple’s encounters presented in the conditional tense: Kate’s husband Joachim had given her “orgiastic ‘satisfaction’ ” but “Cipriano would not”; and Kate,“as she lay, would realise the worthlessness of this foam-effervescence, its strange externality to her” (422). The conditional tense adds an element of detachment to what is supposed to be an emotionally persuasive passage. It is also remarkable that clitoral orgasm is criticized as external, since Lawrence had always emphasized that sexual passion is experienced as an inner energy coming from beyond or outside the bounds of ordinary awareness (422). Here he equates the externality of orgasm with the negative externality of convention (talk) rather than with the positive foreignness—the positive outsider status—of passion. Of course, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence also criticizes Connie’s “beaklike” clitoral orgasms and also associates her self-conscious sexual activity with irritating, conventional sex-talk. It is noteworthy that the image of the gushing fountain in Kate’s new vaginal orgasmic response links this scene to the episode describing the gushing forth of Ramon’s fountainlike body during prayer. However, while Ramon’s orgasmlike prayer involves the supposedly sanctified assertion of “a powerful will,” Kate’s vaginal orgasm entails the seemingly sacred surrender of her “seething feminine will” (169, 422).31 Lawrence thus portrays the male will as a positive force that contributes to selftranscendence, and the female will as a obstacle that must “subside” and be “swept away” for self-transcendence to occur (422). Given the views that Lawrence presents in his books on psychology, one might have expected him to demonstrate that both men and women need to

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establish a balance of self-assertion and surrender in order to achieve a sacred connection in both prayer and sexual intercourse. Many of the novel’s public rituals are even more problematic than its private ones. The shift in focus from individual to collective initiation creates an identification problem for the reader. In The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley, the reader can empathize with individual characters who are interacting with each other and undergoing transformative experiences.The greater the reader’s identification with a particular character, the greater the opportunity for vicarious experience and transformation. In The Plumed Serpent, the reader is in the position of having to empathize with a character (Kate) who in the crucial transformative scenes is often reacting to groups, not to another individual. Because Kate responds to anonymous collectivities of Indians whose characters and modes of consciousness are occluded, readers will likely find it difficult to appreciate what she is experiencing. Another general problem related to the question of identification is the mismatch between Ramon’s audience and Lawrence’s general readership.The rites are designed to awaken the full awareness of the Indians, who supposedly have a more physical form of consciousness than do Europeans. Given Lawrence’s own assumptions about cultural and racial differences in consciousness, what would revitalize an Indian cannot be expected to work for a European or American reader.And yet, he seems to assume that all peoples need a body-based rejuvenation since all vital transformation must begin with access to sacred passion. Moreover, Lawrence is claiming that the Indians are suffering from the sustained influence of a European presence, so that what they need is similar to what Europeans need: a throwing off of mentalistic culture. Still, what the reader seems to confront in these ceremonies is not the mystic “unknown” but the culturally “exotic.” Every tourist to a foreign country can experience the exotic, but this is merely the rediscovery of a cultural form that is already known to the indigenous people. It is not truly a discovery: the shock of the exotic is not the shock of the utterly new, the freshly numinous. Nevertheless, it seems to have been Lawrence’s presumption that one kind of shock can lead to the other— hence, his use of exotic sacred discourses in the novels we have examined. One could argue that in all of the novels we have discussed so far, the reader is in a similar place to that of a “tourist”: rediscovering sacred moments that Lawrence has already discovered and enshrined in language. And yet the purpose of Lawrence’s sacred discourses and literary devices is not simply to recreate numinous experiences but to represent them in ways that evoke new experiences in the reader—affective


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experiences that are related to but not identical repetitions of the characters’ experiences. In the public rituals that Ramon devises, the element of rigid prescription is especially prominent and tends to undermine the attempt at revitalization. Kate herself is aware of this element for she thinks that Ramon is “rather ponderous and deliberate in his ceremonials” (393). Ponderousness and deliberation are qualities that are not conducive to vivifying the Mexican people or the reader. At times Ramon seems to imitate the obsessive–compulsive rituals of orthodox religion. Indeed, given Lawrence’s belief in dynamism, spontaneity, and individual choice, it is astonishing that he chose to create rites that are so formalistic and precise, seemingly as deadly and stiff as the conventional religious forms he had always attacked. And yet, it is clear that he had always been fascinated by ritualistic and mythic details. P. T. Whelan’s analysis of The Rainbow and Women in Love demonstrates the extraordinary extent to which Lawrence built mythic and legendary resonances into his novels.32 And Apocalypse reveals Lawrence’s enduring interest in the symbolic significance of the minutiae of myth and ritual. Fantasia of the Unconscious also reveals his preoccupation with determining the exact location and operation of sensory-affective functions in the upper/lower, front/back, and left/right regions of the body. But it is one thing for a novel to be filled with mythic and ritualistic resonances, and another for it to be filled with myths and rituals.When ritual and myth are made the centerpiece of a novel, the formalistic elements begin to take over and mute the novel’s dynamism. When a mystical novel begins to read as a mystical manual, its revitalizing power is proportionately diminished. The ceremony for the “Opening of the Church” in Chapter XXI stays too self-consciously focused on formal details for it to have a sacralizing impact. This ceremony is minutely prescribed, choreographed, and carried out; offers the participants little room for spontaneity and dynamic equilibrium; and overwhelms the reader with symbolic minutiae that are not presented in vividly realized contexts. Great emphasis is placed on depicting the positions, movements, and dress of Ramon and Cipriano and their men. Moreover, although forms, colors, and numbers are meant to have symbolic value, they are not represented in vibrantly poetic ways. It is as if Lawrence were so anxious to have the ceremony fastidiously correct in every symbolic detail that he has forgotten his intention of wanting to touch the reader’s somatic centers of consciousness. In Western and Eastern meditation practices involving visualization, detailed instructions are sometimes given, but it is understood that the visualization will not have its intended effect until it is practiced many

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times so that the many details can be mastered and internalized. But in a single or even second reading of The Plumed Serpent, the reader can hardly be expected to absorb enough of the details of the Quetzalcoatl ceremonies for them to have an evocative effect. Color is the most pervasive symbolic element in the church opening ceremony. Critics have shown that the colors have alchemical significance, but the very variety of hues and complexity of their deployment is likely to have a more bewildering than vivifying impact.33 For example, Cipriano is depicted as “a brilliant figure in a sarape whose zig-zag whorls of scarlet, white, and black ran curving, dazzling, to the black shoulders” (336). When four men approach Ramon, their colored belts are described in flat descriptive terms: “one put a blue crown with the bird on his brow, one put a red belt round his breast, and another put a yellow belt round his middle, and the last fastened a white belt round his loins” (341). Also, the portrayal of the colors of the altar fire is dully precise:“a blue flame leaped high into the air, followed by a yellow flame, and then a rose-red smoke” (342). Some of the descriptions implicitly emphasize the symbolic significance of the precise positioning of the men of Quetzalcoatl and those of Huitzilopochtli. But again these depictions tend to be leaden. Thus, in front of the church there is “a double row of men in the scarlet sarapes of Huitzilopochtli with the black diamonds on the shoulders”; behind Cipriano is “a double row of the guard of Quetzalcoatl, in their blankets with the blue and black borders”; and in the church, “[t]wo files of the white-clad men of Quetzalcoatl stood in a long avenue” (335–8). The overemphasis on movement and placement undermines the passage’s transformative intent. Some of the positioning information refers to the relationship between the sexes: Cipriano orders the men to go to the right and light, to remove their shoes and to stand; the women are to go down the center, cover their faces, and sit (337).The hierarchical relation of the sexes is also stressed during the marriage of Cipriano and Kate: he is to “kiss the brow and the breast of this woman” while she is to “kiss the feet and the heels of this man” (329). Lawrence had always given special prominence to terms for positioning— above/below, in/out, before/after, in front/behind, center/circumference, between, beyond—but in the church opening ceremony and in the marriage ceremony, the positional terms are too baldly and self-consciously present largely because they refer to actual spatial locations rather than to the spatialization of somatic-affective experience. Thus, readers are less likely to be moved by the description of a group of women sitting in the middle of a group of men than by a description of a character (like


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the newly married Will Brangwen in The Rainbow) who feels at the center of a wheellike world.The spatialization of felt experience can be evocative; the localization of persons is usually not; the latter has mainly an intellectual, not an affective, symbolic significance. This intellectualized process is also seen in Ramon’s emphasis on numerology in his instructions to the people. He even resorts to explaining the meaning of the number four.Thus, after he tells the men to offer to the Morning Star the “wine” of their spirit, “blood” of their heart, “oil” of their belly, and “seed” of their “loins,” he explains that “Fourfold is man. But the star is one star. And one man is but one star” (341).The detailed didacticism and lack of rhythmic variation in the portrayal of the ceremony contributes to the scene’s flatness. What Lawrence has not prepared the reader to understand intuitively, Ramon must present pedantically.34 Both Ramon and Lawrence have ignored Ramon’s advice to serve “an inspiration,” not “an idea” (73).The reader is all too aware of Lawrence laboring to make a formally correct rite according to his own conception. Much of the color and numerological symbolism in this novel is explained in Lawrence’s Apocalypse. In that exegetical work, didacticism is appropriate; in the sacralizing phase of the novel, it is not. Moreover, as we said in our analysis of Lady Chatterley, the Book of Revelation has been both praised and criticized for its geometric structure and numerical symbolism, and recent critics have shown that this structure and symbolism contribute to a sense of stasis and timelessness.35 It appears that Lawrence’s fascination with the Book of Revelation has worked against his commitment to dynamism. In imitating John’s precise preoccupation with position, color, and number, he has introduced too much fixity into his novel.We saw a similar link between numerology and fixity in the structuring of Lady Chatterley. Finally, critics have observed that the ceremonial symbolism stresses polarity and balance, while the structure of the community, and the relation to competing groups suggest hierarchy and willful domination.36 More generally, despite Ramon’s, the narrator’s and Lawrence’s wish to bridge Indian physicality and European spirituality, the novel seems to value mindless sensuality more than mind– body balance. We have seen that in Ramon’s prayers and in Cipriano’s initiation, the extinguishing of mind is central.We will soon see that the Quetzalcoatl dances also have a “mindless” quality.Thus, while the novel’s main symbol is the plumed serpent, representing a balance of bird-spirit and serpent-body, and while the Mexican people are often disparaged for being largely serpentlike, the most valorized mode of consciousness in the novel is, nevertheless, mindless sensuality.

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In the most disturbing ceremony in the novel—the execution of the “traitors”—Lawrence uses rhetoric rather than drama to justify the official acts of murder. The ceremony is supposed to be sacralizing in the sense that Lawrence wants the reader to feel that there is something sacred about killing traitors to a noble cause. But the rite is unnecessarily bloodthirsty and insufficiently compassionate; indeed, an arbitrary act of mercy (the drawing of lots to determine who is spared) is no mercy at all. The event has a rigidly didactic and legalistic structure that strains to justify itself: the offenders and their punishments are defined by the authority (Cipriano); the necessity of the punishment is corroborated by a second person (a singer); the charges against the accused are repeated by the authority; two sets of executions, one for the traitors and the other for the cowards, are summarily carried out, with the exception of one pardon; the authority’s authority to exact capital punishment is reasserted. Lawrence, the flaunter of law, has embraced the law with a vengeance. The defiant Lawrence had opposed laws that sustained values he detested; the lawful Lawrence is here promulgating laws that express his values.The lawful Lawrence seems prepared to kill all those who stand in the way of his vision—a frightening echo of Robespierre and his Reign of Terror. This misanthropy was evident in Women in Love and in the letters he wrote at the time, but in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence seems willing to offer mass executions as a general solution against those individuals who oppose or betray his political–religious vision.37 The only justifications for the executions are given in Cipriano’s martial poem, in “The Song of the Grey Dog” sung by an unnamed singer, and in Cipriano’s poetic pronouncements after the first set of executions and before the second set. In the poem, consisting of “short, martial sentences,” Cipriano defines cowards, liars, traitors, and thieves as “grey dogs” who “devour the dream,” and he proclaims that they deserve to be knifed (376). Definition and proclamation constitute a flimsy justification; there has been no discussion of the appropriateness of the punishments. Immediately after Cipriano delivers his pronouncement, a singer sings “The Song of the Grey Dog” in which the speaker, presumably Huitzilopochtli, tells the story of a person who was attacked by the grey dog and was told by “the Great One” to “Track him down! / Kill him in his unclean house” and to “kill him there with one stroke” for he is “a murderer of dreams” (377).Thus, a second party seems to provide personal evidence of the need to carry out the execution. After the first set of executions, Cipriano asserts, in verse, that “The Lords of Life are the Masters of Death,” and thus self-authorizes his own abusive power (378). This is another perverse use of poetry, and readers will not be persuaded


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by its blatant self-justifying intention.We also note that the initial capitals are restored to the appellations “Lord” and “Master” to help justify the two capital punishments; earlier, Ramon had said “We will be masters among men, and lords among men” (178). Before the second set of executions, Cipriano conducts a kind of colloquy with his guard in which he asserts that “men that are less than men must be put away, lest they multiply too much. Men that are more than men have the judgment of men that are less than men.—Shall they die?” (379).The guards reply in mindless unison that “They shall surely die, my Lord” (379).The ritualized approval of Cipriano’s self-authorized act of execution is deeply disturbing.The repetition of “men” is in line with the novel’s obsession with defining appropriate gender roles.38 It should be emphasized that the novel does possess passages that portray religious rites in a genuinely vivid manner. In the scenes depicting the ceremonial dances, the writing achieves a lyrically persuasive note not found in the ceremonial passages where discursive instructions and explanations proliferate, and where brutal pronouncements and rationalizations abound. It is ironic that these passages are so effective, given the fact that dance constitutes the one rite least shaped by Ramon: supposedly, he has made only modest modifications to the people’s traditional dance forms. In fact, Lawrence adapted the dance forms of the American Indians he observed in New Mexico and represented in Mornings in Mexico.39 It is also revealing that the less Ramon invents, the more effective the ritual form seems. Both Ramon and Lawrence suffer from too much self-conscious creation. The portrayals of the dances in Chapter VII,“The Plaza,” build, and then taper off, in vivifying power. Instead of reaching a dramatic crescendo, they peak in abstract, philosophical language. All the dances are presented from Kate’s perspective, which eventually shifts from that of observer to participant. Her perspective is given because by this point in the narrative she has become the novel’s transformational focus.In the first dance,there is initially one dancer; the description is detailed, concrete, and vivid, and its rhythmic language is intended to have a mildly hypnotic effect on the reader: One of the seated men . . . began softly to dance the dance step. Mindless, dancing heavily and with a curious bird-like sensitiveness of the feet, he began to tread the earth with his bare soles, as if treading himself deep into the earth. Alone, with curious pendulum rhythm, leaning a little forward from a powerful backbone, he trod to the drumbeat, his white knees lifting and lifting alternately against the dark fringe of his blanket, with a queer dark splash. (128)

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Lawrence’s typical technique of word repetition (dance, tread, lift) governed by a few controlling figures (bird, pendulum) is operating here. Moreover, the phrases in the last sentence mime the dancer’s motion: the successive phrases elongate as the dancer moves forward with one foot, shorten as the foot hits the ground, lengthen as the second foot begins its forward movement, and shorten again as it touches the earth. But the external perspective acts to limit the affective impact. When other men join the dancer, a circle dance commences, and Kate’s perspective reveals a blend of dancing, singing, and drumming.The harmonious interchange of music and dance is emphasized through the focus on rhythmic sound and bodily motion. Some of the rhythmic and figurative language of the earlier passage is repeated and intensified: The song seemed to take new wild flights, after it had sunk and rustled to a last ebb. It was like waves that rise out of the invisible, and rear up into foam and a flying, disappearing whiteness and a rustle of extinction. And the dancers, after dancing in a circle in a slow, deep absorption, each man changeless in his own place, treading the same dust with the soft churning of bare feet, slowly, slowly began to revolve, till the circle was slowly revolving round the fire, with always the same soft, down-sinking, churning tread. And the drum kept the changeless living beat, like a heart, and the song rose and soared and fell, ebbed and ebbed to a sort of extinction, then heaved up again. (128–9) The pendulum rhythm of the dancer in the earlier passage now gives way to the wavelike rhythm of the song and the heartlike beat of the drum. And the birdlike sensitiveness of the dancer’s feet exfoliates into the birdlike flights of song.The sense of the wave taking flight is nicely conveyed in the phrase “and rear up into foam and a flying disappearing whiteness”: the first half of the phrase establishes the verticality of the wave, and the second half adds a sense of increased and unexpected motion through the use of the two present participles. In the third sentence, Lawrence weaves together the individual and collective movements of the dancers, shifting from the collective circling to the individual treading and then back to the collective; dancer and dance seem almost indistinguishable. Other dualities are also bridged: individuals move and yet appear to stand still, and while remaining singular, they seem to merge into one another (“each man changeless in his own place, treading the same dust”). What creates communion is not only the common tread but also the common earth (dust): the dancers are


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simultaneously in harmony with each other and with their natural surrounding, which molds and is molded by their footsteps. Kate thus experiences a rhythmic pattern of collective male energy. But when Kate shifts from observer to participant, the psychonarration emphasizes her thoughts more than her feelings—just the opposite of what would be expected and called for to vivify the reader.The language becomes less rhythmic and more philosophically abstract as her thoughts are filled with generalizations about those with whom she is dancing: The outer wheel was all men. She seemed to feel the strange dark glow of them upon her back. Men, dark, collective men, nonindividual. And herself woman, wheeling upon the great wheel of womanhood. Men and women alike danced with faces lowered and expressionless, abstract, gone in the deep absorption of men into the greater manhood, women in the greater womanhood. It was sex, but the greater, not the lesser sex.The waters over the earth wheeling upon the waters under the earth, like an eagle silently wheeling above its own shadow. She felt her sex and her womanhood caught up and identified in the slowly revolving ocean of nascent life, the dark sky of the men lowering and wheeling above. (131) Despite the narratorial insistence that Kate’s feelings are being reported (“She seemed to feel”;“She felt”), the passage is largely abstract, and these abstractions have not been sufficiently earned: they do not follow, or are not woven into, a detailed and concrete description of Kate’s experience; rather they replace that description. The portrayal of her response does not have many sensory and emotive details. The only concrete details refer to her perception of the “lowered and expressionless” faces and the circular motion of the men and women.The motion is only slightly concretized through its embodiment in a series of figures: the Biblical metaphor of the upper waters wheeling above the lower waters, and the simile of the eagle wheeling above its shadow. In The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley, philosophical abstractions are most effective in the sacralizing episodes when they supplement more concrete portrayals. The problem stems in part from the fact that Kate is reacting to the group and not to an individual. In a novel about the establishment of a religious movement, Lawrence thought it essential to convey the nature of collective transformative experiences. By focusing on Kate’s experience of collective rituals, he was trying to portray her experience “beyond

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the individualism of the body” (131). But in attempting to represent Kate’s response to a collective activity, he resorted to endowing her with very abstract responses.This problem of abstractness was always inherent in Lawrence’s emphasis on the sacredness of the impersonal and the nonhuman (the animal) in human relationships. But while it is difficult to convey a sense of how these qualities—impersonality and animality— operate in a single body, it is even harder to suggest how they operate in a group of bodies or in a single body responding to a group of bodies. In effect, the group adds a secondary level of abstractness and obscurity, and this complication attenuates opportunities for engaging the reader’s empathic identification. The tendency to reduce the Mexican people to abstractions is strong and quick in Kate and contributes to the novel’s failure to be powerfully transformative where Lawrence would have it be. Instead of responding vicariously to Kate’s experiences of the Mexicans, readers are more likely to detach from her because of her propensity to construct derogatory stereotypes. Kate regularly sees the masses as lacking individuated personalities and mental–spiritual development, but she has only minimal commerce and communication with individuals. Most of her portrayals of Mexican Indians are collective portraits with an external focus: usually, she observes a group of Indians dancing or singing or marching or standing around, and the reader is given access to her perceptions, thoughts or feelings about the Indians’ actions, talk, or appearance. Her perspective is almost always tendentiously reductive. In many ways, what Kate says of Diego Rivera’s frescoes could be said of her perceptions of the Indians: “These flat Indians were symbols in the great script of socialism. . . . That was all they were used for: symbols in the weary script of socialism and anarchy” (52). In Kate’s mind, the Indians also seem flat: they appear to be symbols in Lawrence’s “syncretic theocracy.”40 Kate equates Mexico with the Indians, and her experience of them is generic.41 Already in Chapter I, Kate is characterizing the crowd at the bullfight as “the mob” and denouncing their “mob authority” (11). To her, men “prowled” back and forth “like lost mongrels” (12). In Chapter IV, she offers a summary of her impressions, which have a largely external focus: Mexico meant the dark-faced men in cotton clothes and big hats: the peasants, peons, pelados, Indians, call them what you will. The mere natives. . . . Mexico still meant the mass of silent peons, to her. And she thought of them again, these silent, stiff-backed men, driving their strings of asses. . . . There is some Indian quality which


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pervades the whole. . . . The erect, prancing walk. . . . The jaunty balancing of the huge hats. The thrown-back shoulders. . . . Their big, bright black eyes. (75–6) Kate describes the men’s clothes as well as the postures and movements of their bodies; she has obviously had few if any deep encounters with the Indians, and yet her portrayal implicitly attributes certain psychological qualities: indeed,“stiff-backed,”“erect, prancing,”“jaunty balancing,” and “thrown-back” all imply a kind of cocky assertiveness or resistance. She is also quick to reduce the women to “images of wild submissiveness” just from having observed them in a church: seeing them praying, she infers that they “swayed with devotion of fear and ecstasy” and “crouched like people not quite created” (77).These are the inferences of a tourist hasty to categorize and emblematize her superficial impressions. The reader cannot discover if these people have individualized selves because no narratorial attention is given to their inner lives. In Chapter VII, Kate sees the plaza as “belong[ing] to the peons,” and her account of the plaza is for the most part collective and summarizing, like that of a travelogue with personal commentary: They sat thick on the benches, or slowly strolled round in their sandals and blankets. . . . At the booths which sold tequila, men, women, and boys sat on the benches. . . . Usually there would be a couple of smallish young men with guitars. . . . The young peons in their little white blouses. . . . The Indians on the seats, they too watched the dancers for a while.Then they turned against them the heavy negation of indifference, like a stone on the spirit. . . . The curious, radical opposition of the Indians to the thing we call the Spirit. (113–6) The judgment of the Indians’ inner state is based almost entirely on outward gestures, and strikes the reader as more Kate’s projection than a psychological actuality. In Chapter IX, Kate blithely generalizes about the sexual relations between Indian women and men: “The women seemed, on the whole, softly callous and determined to go their own way: to change men if they wished.And the men seemed not to care very profoundly. But it was the women who wanted the men” (151). At least in this description, the verb “seemed” softens the oversimplification. When Kate’s perspective on individual Indians is offered, the focus is almost always external, and when an inner account is given, it is usually Kate’s intuitive guess—or projection. In either case, her perceptions do

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not emerge from deep or prolonged contact, and the psychonarrations are not likely to be profoundly transformative. For example, on her boat trip to Sayula, Kate has a kind of “communion” with one of the native boatmen (107).Although the scene has a certain genuine tenderness, we only get her guess as to the man’s state of mind; and this verbalized perspective sounds more like her projection (or Lawrence’s fabrication) than the man’s actual point of view: “And the man . . . said to her with his eyes: We are living! I know your sex, and you know mine.The mystery we are glad not to meddle with.You leave me my natural honour, and I thank you for the grace” (107). The only exceptions to the rule of Kate having brief, and often superficial, contacts with Indians are her relationships with Juana’s family and with Cipriano. Juana is based on Lawrence’s criada (“maid-of-all-work”) in Chapala, Isabel de Medina.42 Significantly, the narrator reveals that Kate’s “servants were the clue to all the native life, for her” (151).This is indeed a very small sample for making judgments about an entire people! In Chapter IX, we see clearly how quickly and easily Kate jumps from simple observations of Juana’s family to gross generalizations about the Indian populace.When Kate observes Ezequiel, Juana’s son, eating “with a certain blind, rapid indifference,” she swiftly concludes that “that also seems to be Mexican.They seem to eat even with a certain hostile reluctance, and have a strange indifference to what or when they eat” (141). After observing how Juana’s daughters throw stones at each other with “savage ferocity,” and how boys at the beach make similar “savage attacks,” Kate generalizes that “Always the same thing among the young: a ceaseless, endless taunting and tormenting.The same as among the Red Indians” (146–7). Moreover, readers will probably be unconvinced by Kate’s complaint that “I don’t want to exploit them [her servants]. . . . I never insult them. I am so careful not to hurt them. And then they deliberately make these centipede attacks on me, and are pleased when I am hurt” (149). Kate’s repeated generalizations are insulting, and such insults reveal her exploitative relation to Juana’s family. Kate even thinks that “While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce” (148). In relation to her servants, Kate seems to be trying to maintain her white leadership position. She even thinks that “let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs” (148). Kate does have an involved relationship with Cipriano, but his character seems more European than Indian, despite the claim, by either Kate or the narrator (it is hard to say which) that his British “education lay like


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a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness” (82). Cipriano has been exposed to European ideas from an early age by his godfather, a bishop, and it is probably because he is so European that Lawrence dares to narrate his consciousness. But Lawrence also needs Cipriano to be a typical Indian in order to make his rigid symbology work out. And yet, Mrs. Norris, an archaeologist, seems to speak for others—including many readers—when she says that Cipriano (like Ramon) is “entirely the exception” among Mexicans (30). Still, Kate persists in seeing Cipriano as an emblematic Indian, as if taking the cue from Lawrence. In Chapter XVII, she refers to him “slip[ping] back into the inevitable Mexican General, fascinated by the opportunity for furthering his own personal ambition and imposing his own personal will” (253). In Chapter XX, three quarters of the way into the novel, she still experiences him as she has experienced other Mexican men and the Mexican landscape itself: he has “a sort of glaze of the ordinary world on top, and underneath a black volcano with hell knows what depths of lava” (309).43 Cipriano also seems to her to have “that secret hauteur and aloofness of the savage” (312). And even in the novel’s penultimate chapter, Kate persists in reducing Cipriano to a type: “He was first and foremost a soldier” (419). An important component of the novel’s vitalization phase is Ramon’s hymns. These hymns are supposed to represent the fruit of Ramon’s combined intellectual and intuitive efforts, but the didacticism of many of the hymns indicates that a creative fusion has not been fully achieved. The didacticism also prevents the hymns from having a deeply vivifying effect. The narrative line of the hymns emphasizes the reign, rejection, and return of Quetzalcoatl, and his replacement of Jesus and Mary.The thematic dimension enumerates the religious and moral obligations of Quetzalcoatl’s would-be followers and interlaces these prescriptions and proscriptions with symbols that are meant to touch the deep somaticaffective centers of the people. But often the symbols are not subtly introduced and integrated, and are not deployed in the context of intoxicating rhythms and sound play. In short, many hymns are belabored poems that cannot be expected to persuade the Mexican people or the reader.44 And yet Lawrence thought it necessary to include the hymns because the singing of songs and the reciting of myths are essential elements of most religious communities: at their best, these activities bind the people together by vividly representing their shared beliefs about origins, values, and practices and by offering opportunities for powerful, shared emotional experiences.45 It should be said that some of these hymns cleverly echo the themes, symbols, images, and rhythms

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of English translations of Aztec and Navajo hymns that Lawrence read, but the cleverness of his re-creations does not ensure their evocative power for the reader.46 One might expect the first hymn, presented in Chapter VII, to be particularly evocative since it inaugurates Ramon’s attempt to inspire the involvement of the Mexican people as well as Lawrence’s attempt to rouse the reader.What we find instead is a simple first-person narrative. The speaker is Quetzalcoatl, and he tells of his sleep in a cave “behind the sun,” his hearing Jesus sing that he is coming home, his helping Jesus return, and his journey to Mexico.The opening stanzas show the hymn’s peculiarly stiff form and didactic content: In the place of the west In peace, beyond the lashing of the sun’s bright tail, In the stillness where waters are born Slept I, Quetzalcoatl. In the cave which is called Dark Eye, Behind the sun, looking through him as a window Is the place.There the waters rise, There the winds are born. (119) The poem schematizes Ramon’s plan to replace Jesus with Quetzalcoatl. It is as if Ramon knew he was going to overwhelm the people—and Lawrence knew he was going to shock the reader—with the details of this newly manufactured religion, and so decided to give a preview of the supposedly spontaneous unfolding of this religious movement. Being a summary, the hymn is not very lyrical; it introduces key symbols and figures but does not imbed them in a strongly rhythmic form.The main images and metaphors are the eye, womb, star, and bird, all of which we have seen in other novels. The hymn is followed a few pages later by a third-person, sermonlike narrative that acts as a kind of flashback that gives Quetzalcoatl’s background. This quasi-mythic narrative runs over three pages and recounts Quetzalcoatl’s experience in Mexico: his teaching the people to sow maize and beans and build boats; his giving life and power to the people and warning that they must heed the power of their bodies; the people’s eventual forgetting of his message, which results in their weakening and his growing old; and his need for departure, which coincides with the arrival of Jesus and Mary, who are understood as sources of comfort not power. It also details the wearying out and return of Son and Mother to God the Father. This narrative is both an expanded version of the first


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hymn as well as a prelude to it; it also offers an explanation, justification, and script of the events to come.47 The most significant part of the sermonlike narrative shifts to first person, and Quetzalcoatl is allowed to tell of his experiences at some length. The first person narration is figuratively rich, but still didactic: The man on the hill said: I am Quetzalcoatl, who breathed moisture on your dry mouths. I filled your breast with breath from beyond the sun. I am the wind that whirls from the heart of the earth, the little winds that whirl like snakes round your feet and your legs and thighs, lifting up the head of the snake of your body, in whom is your power.When the snake of your body lifts its head, beware! It is I, Quetzalcoatl, rearing up in you, rearing up and reaching beyond the bright day, to the sun of darkness beyond, where is your home at last. (123) Like a mini-sermon, the speech tells the reader what to value: spontaneous bodily energy. And because the narrative explains its own imagery—the snake is explicitly associated with bodily power, the dark sun, and upward movement—it artificially limits its own symbolic resonances. A self-conscious, first-person narrator cannot have the vivifying effect that Lawrence intends.48 The vivifying passages in the other novels we have discussed are almost always rendered in the third person. In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence was faced with the problem of presenting first-person myths to English and American readers who are not accustomed to reading long accounts of godly humans. Such narratives are common in Native American myths, but they are likely to strike many Western readers as more amusing or exotic than inspiring. Moreover, Native Americans are used to understanding the “I” in a myth or story as the collective or impersonal “I,” whereas modern Western readers generally understand only the personal, self-referential meanings of “I.” In Chapter XI, a hymn focuses self-consciously and almost obsessively on directional positioning. It is an excessively elaborate meditation on betweenness. We saw this overt preoccupation with positioning in our analysis of the Quetzalcoatl rituals. The hymn shifts from third to first person and envisions Quetzalcoatl as a bird: The Lord of the Morning Star Stood between the day and the night: As a bird that lifts its wings, and stands With the bright wing on the right

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D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience And the wing of the dark on the left, The Dawn Star stood into sight. Lo! I am always here! Far in the hollow of space .................... But I, I am always in place. Yes, I am always here. I am Lord ......................... But ye that perceive me between The tremors of night and the day .......................... Between the wings of the endless flight (177–8)

Again, the first person presentation offers a level of self-consciousness that interferes with Lawrence’s vivifying intentions.This hymn also has a certain vagueness and juvenile silliness (the talking bird analyzes his station) that cannot be expected to be revitalizing. Chapter XV presents “The Written Hymns of Quetzalcoatl.” One of the three hymns expands on the events outlined in the first hymn. The dialogues between Quetzalcoatl and Jesus are now spelled out, and we even get Jesus’s hokey, folky self-introduction: “My name is Jesus, and they called me Christ. Men crucified me on a Cross till I died. But I rose up out of the place where they put me, and I went up to heaven to my Father. Now my Father has told me to come to Mexico” (222). When Quetzalcoatl asks, “You alone?” Jesus replies, “My mother is here. She shed many tears for me, seeing me crucify[sic]. So she will hold the Sons of Mexico on her lap” (222).The dialogue almost reads as if it were from a children’s history book. Movements in European History (1921) was written for secondary school students; this hymn seems to have been written for readers still in primary school! Indeed Lawrence seems to have thought of many Mexicans as little more than children.And in this novel, he sometimes treats the reader as a child to be instructed by one preachy lesson after another. We have seen that the novel’s consistent resort to religious rhetoric and to external descriptions of ritual cannot make up for the lack of concrete, vivid representations of authentic sacred exchanges. It seems clear, then, that when Lawrence composed The Plumed Serpent, he was all too self-conscious and insistent about his role as religious initiator. Instead of creating vivifying scenes portraying the evocative flux and reflux of a protagonist’s sacred interchange with


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another individual, he devised episodes in which the protagonist responds to groups of anonymous Indians in the context of didactic and compulsively detailed ceremonies that promote a militant, authoritarian religion. Moreover, to make his initiation rite work out according to plan, Lawrence had to contrive many of Kate’s responses, often substituting fake thoughts for authentic feelings, and to occlude the reactions of the Indians with whom she interacted. Perhaps, Lawrence’s fairly brief stays in Mexico prevented him from developing a more authentic and compelling portrait of Mexico and its peoples. Nevertheless, I believe that his literary genius enabled him to create enough masterful scenes to produce a dazzling, disturbing masterpiece of world literature.When he finally turned to composing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he returned to writing about what he knew best: the dynamic relations among English men and women living in their homeland. In that novel Lawrence is no longer trying to portray individuals as permanently identified with the gods; rather, he returns to showing that divine energies manifest within and between individuals when they relate to one another in deep, mutual, and authentic ways. In those moments of numinous connection, individuals may experience themselves as gods or as godly or as simply at one with the Source.

Conclusion

The overall trajectory of Lawrence’s experimentation with the initiatory pattern strangely mirrors the structure of The Rainbow: just as successive Brangwen generations progressively lose connection with their sources of vitality and integration, so too does Lawrence gradually lose contact with his own most creative—energetic, positive, and inventive— resources. It is as if in portraying the decline of the Brangwen generations, he prophesied his own physical, emotional, and artistic decline. The result is that The Rainbow is the most effective embodiment of the transformative pattern, and The Plumed Serpent the least effective. Lady Chatterley’s Lover can be considered a final rallying of resources before the ultimate fall into death. When writing The Rainbow, Lawrence was filled with a sense of discovery, energy, and connection that resembles that of the unnamed Brangwen generation. At that time, he was inspired by his own new marriage, his burgeoning creative powers, and his recently articulated religious vitalism, and so was able to write a transformative novel suffused with energy and imagination and not easily reducible to an ideological or structural formula. The basic elements of the initiatory pattern—a destructive phase and a sacralization phase—are present, but the techniques employed in those phases do not narrowly or rigidly conform to dogmatic assertions about destruction and sacralization. Destruction is linked to a verbal, visual split consciousness, and sacralization is tied to an integrated, body-based awareness, but the techniques for evoking these forms of consciousness in the reader have the quality of being newly minted. Even the conceptual linkages are handled in subtle and complex ways and so tend to operate on the reader in a subliminal manner. In a way, Lawrence’s own recent initiation into a passionate, committed relationship with Frieda made it possible for him to construct a novel with a powerful hierophantic design.

Conclusion

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Women in Love fleshes out the destructive phase of The Rainbow in a truly inventive and energetic way because it reflects Lawrence’s fresh rage over the War, over his worsening physical condition, and over his turbulent relationships with his wife, friends, and fellow countrymen. But the sacralization phase of Women in Love lacks the power to revitalize the reader, for Lawrence has already begun to substitute the rhetoric of the sacred for the poetry of the sacred. It is as if his rage and illness cut him off from his pre-War power to invent convincing vivification devices. He does experiment with new sacred discourses—like that of Tantric yoga—but the sacralizing passages are weighed down by the obscurity and abstractness of these terms and by even more abstract attempts to explain them. And the effort to vivify is muted by the pervasive negativity of misanthropy. It is significant that in 1929 Lawrence advised the young novelist Edward Dahlberg to always write with bitterness.1 From Women in Love onward, Lawrence’s own work is often marred by extreme acridity. Just as the third named Brangwen generation (Ursula and Skrebensky) is hindered by excessive self-consciousness and assertiveness, so too is Lawrence hampered by similar difficulties as he writes his later novels.The leadership novels show Lawrence all too insistently applying the initiatory pattern to male–male relationships and to public rites. The sense of narratorial distortion, fabrication, and didacticism in The Plumed Serpent simultaneously exposes and undermines Lawrence’s effort to initiate the reader.While there is much narrative and poetic experimentation in the sacralizing passages, their effectiveness is undercut by the vagueness, generality, and reflexivity of the language and by the violent, authoritarian politics. Some have argued that the most vivid passages in the novel are the descriptions of the Mexican landscape. Lady Chatterley’s Lover represents a partial rebound from the downward trajectory of Lawrence’s experimentation with the initiatory design. It is as if the increasing physical weakness and pain in his last years softened his bitterness and stridency and made it more possible for him to retap the spring that gave rise to The Rainbow.2 The many echoes of the early novel in the latter indicate that he was trying to get back to positive sources of inspiration that had been muted or distorted since the advent of the War. It is especially significant that the organic discourse used to depict the medieval Brangwens finds its way into the sacralizing passages in Lady Chatterley. It is as if Connie and Mellors, despite their modern alienation, have access to the same natural energies that animated Ursula’s ancestors. Moreover, the hope that Connie and Mellors feel at the end of the novel is a kind of echo of Ursula’s rainbow experience at the end of The Rainbow.

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One important difference between The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley is that the destructive phase of the earlier novel is associated with an intense annihilating force, while the destructive phase of the later novel is linked to a depleted disintegrative force.This difference is due in part to the fact that the characters in The Rainbow are pre-War and those in Lady Chatterley are post-War: the War has in effect enervated the most modern generation. But the shift may also reflect Lawrence’s realization that the energetic, inventive language used in the earlier novel may have been subliminally attractive to readers; in the later novel, it would be better to repulse readers by associating destruction and death with depletion, rather than with vigorous violence, for vigor, of whatever kind, is inherently alluring.Another important difference between the novels is that Lady Chatterley is more rigidly coded. We have seen that after Women in Love Lawrence tends to recycle words that he associates with either the destructive or the vivification phase.Thus, “mind,”“metal,” and “machine” are regularly used in the destructive phases of the later novels, and “body” and “blood” are deployed in the vivification phases.3 Connected with the issue of codification is that of abstractness. The didactic imperative in the later novels tends to overload the sacralizing episodes with abstractions. In The Rainbow, in contrast, abstract terms are more sparingly and effectively woven into concretely textured passages. In examining how literary technique shapes the flow of consciousness in the reader, I have tried to demonstrate the value of linking a poetics of technique to a phenomenology of the reading experience.We have seen that for Lawrence the critical dimension of consciousness is the degree of integration, which is largely determined by the degree of embodiment. His devices work to splinter the reader’s logocentric, ocularcentric consciousness and then to reintegrate “the whole corpus of the consciousness.”4 Because the split consciousness is a major subject of inquiry today, I believe it is worthwhile exploring the various literary techniques that have been used to both accentuate and heal these splits. Like the Romantics, Lawrence believed that language could shatter and fuse, limit and liberate, consciousness. His paradoxical view of language is paralleled by a paradoxical view of the image: the overvaluation of vision contributes to the splitting of consciousness, and yet powerful organic and elemental symbols have the affective capacity to reintegrate and reinvigorate awareness. Paradox—the coincidence of contraries—was always at the heart of Lawrence’s understanding of the sacred and is the central principle structuring his transformational pattern.This centrality of paradox is consistent with his view that the “great systole diastole of the universe” involves an oscillation, a dynamic balance, between destructive and creative forces.5

NOTES

Introduction 1. Letter 550 in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 519. 2. In “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1914), Lawrence does distinguish between religious and artistic effort; the former uses symbols to portray the “aspiration” for the eternal union of opposites while the latter expresses the “knowledge” attained from actual achieved moments of union: “The religious effort is to conceive, to symbolise that which the human soul, or the soul of the race, lacks . . . it is the symbolising of a great desire. . . . Whereas the artistic effort is the effort of utterance, the supreme effort of expressing knowledge, that which has been for once, that which was enacted, where the two wills [to motion and to inertia] met and intersected and left their result, complete for the moment” (Study of Thomas Hardy 59). For a discussion of Lawrence’s early philosophical–religious essays, see Michael Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3. George A. Panichas examines Lawrence’s relation to Christianity in Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence’s Religious Quest (London: Mouton, 1964). Daniel J. Schneider discusses Lawrence’s “religious sense of life” in The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986) 1–16. 4. On December 25, 1912, Lawrence wrote to Sallie Hopkin that “I shall always be a priest of love”; see Letter 531, Letters, vol. 1, 493. On April 23, 1913, he wrote to Arthur McLeod that “I do write because I want folk—English folk—to alter, and have more sense”; see Letter 573, Letters, vol. 1, 544. There are important differences between the offices of priest, prophet, hierophant, and visionary, but I emphasize here their common role of seeking to promote and provoke religious experience—contact with divinity. Lawrence himself stresses the common denominator among the various religious offices when in The Plumed Serpent the narrator refers to Don Ramon as priest, prophet, initiator, natural aristocrat, saviour, and son of God (248–9, 265). 5. Lawrence sees the “sense of wonder” as central, defining it as “the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea”; it is “our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense” (“Hymns in a Man’s Life” [1928], Late Essays 132). 6. William James argues that “feeling [compared to reason] is the deeper source of religion” and that “Our impulsive belief ” in a religious experience “is here always what sets up the original body of truth. . . . The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us”; see The Varieties of Religious Experience:A Study in Human Nature (New York: New American Library, 1958 [1902]) 329, 73. For a discussion of Lawrence’s familiarity with James, see Daniel J. Schneider, D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984) 19–27; see also Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E.T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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1980 [1935]) 113.The German theologian Rudolf Otto asserts that the feeling, not the concept, of the sacred is the ineffable, universal core of religious experience; he calls this feeling “the numinous” because it is the emotional response to “the numen” (Latin for “the divine power”); see The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Ideas of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923 [1917, German ed.]) 7. I have no direct evidence of Lawrence’s knowledge of Otto, but he may have heard about the theologian through Frieda’s connections in Germany or through his friends in London, for Otto’s book was popular enough to be translated into English six years after its original publication in German.The Canadian doctor Richard Bucke, who is cited by both James and Ouspensky for his analysis of the religious experiences of poets and prophets, writes that “cosmic consciousness” is characterized by “an emotion of joy, assurance, triumph,‘salvation’. . . ecstasy”; see Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1901]) 73. For a discussion of Lawrence’s possible familiarity with Bucke, see Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition (New York: Taplinger, 1971) 42, 129–30. P. D. Ouspensky, a Russian philosopher and Theosophist, emphasizes the role of feelings in providing knowledge of the “noumenal” realm; see Tertium Organum:A Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and P. D. Ouspensky (New York: Knopf, 1981 [1920]) 178–94. Lawrence read Ouspensky in 1923; see Rose Marie Burwell, “A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading,” in A D. H. Lawrence Handbook, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) 97. 7. In the “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1914), Lawrence claims that art seeks to portray the “moment of union” between polarized entities or energies (Study of Thomas Hardy 59). Similarly, in “The Crown” (1915), he describes art as “the revelation of a pure, an absolute relation between the two eternities”—the antinomies of flesh and spirit, female and male, origin and end, stasis and motion (Reflections on the Death 302). This polarized relation creates a sense of wholeness. Lawrence surely knew that “wholeness,”“holiness,” and “health” all have the same Indo-European root: kailo (“whole, uninjured, of good omen”). 8. In “Art and Morality” (1925), Lawrence explains that the artist’s religious recognition of “the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux” occurs in “the fourth dimension” and “means a new morality” based on the idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings (Study of Thomas Hardy 167–8). Lawrence asserts that visionary art exists in “the fourth dimension.” In discussing Van Gogh’s painting, he insists that “The vision on the canvas is a thing, utterly intangible and inexplicate, the offspring of the sunflower itself and Van Gogh himself. . . . It exists, to tell the truth, only in the much-debated fourth dimension. . . . It is a revelation of the perfected relation, at a certain moment, between a man and a sunflower. . . . It is in between everything, in the fourth dimension” (Study of Thomas Hardy 171). His reference to “the fourth dimension” demonstrates his acquaintance with Einstein’s theory of relativity. In 1923, he had read P. D. Ouspensky’s discussion of Einstein in Tertium Organum (Burwell 97). Ouspensky argues that Einstein’s understanding of time as “the fourth dimension of space” supports the religious idea of the “Eternal Now”:“We must admit that the past, the present and the future do not differ from one another in any way, that the only thing that exists is the present” (Ouspensky 33, 29). In “Morality and the Novel,” Lawrence associates the eternality of life with the fourth dimension:“By life, we mean something that gleams, that has the fourth-dimenisonal quality” (Study of Thomas Hardy 173). He also reaffirms that “[t]he business of art is to reveal the relations between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment” and that “morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness” (Study of Thomas Hardy 171–2).The stress on “trembling and changing” indicates that balance is a dynamic process, not a fixed state. 9. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: Image Books, 1990 [1910]) 35–43. For a discussion of the likelihood that Lawrence had read Underhill, see P. T. Whelan, D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988) 198 (note 16).

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10. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s influence on Lawrence, see Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987); Kingsley Widmer, Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) 40–69; Robert E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 73–131; and T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 43ff. Lawrence probably read Nietzsche as early as 1908 (Milton 2). 11. Studies in Classic American Literature 70. Nietzsche considered preservation, destruction, and creation to be the three metamorphoses of the spirit; see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) 25–28.These powers are symbolized by the camel, the lion, and the child and represent the phases of artistic process or development.They also are the powers of the Hindu trinity:Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma. Hence, the artist’s powers are divine powers. 12. For a discussion of “twice-born religion,” see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 124. In “The Reality of Peace” (1917), Lawrence says that the dual rhythm of creation and destruction in art and in spiritual rebirth is ultimately grounded in the “great systole–diastole of the universe” (Reflections on the Death 27). I use the terms “(re)vivification,” “(re)vitalization,” “rejuvenation,” “(re)integration,” “(re)unification,” and “(re)sacralization” to characterize the creation phase; and the terms “disintegration,”“mortification,” and “dissolution” to characterize the destruction phase. 13. In Greek, eidos (“idea”) means “to see.” In “Art and Morality,” Lawrence echoes Nietsche’s analysis of the modern mind:“This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture.That is, he is complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest is just setting, background. . . . This has been the development of the conscious ego in man . . . since Greece first broke the spell of ‘darkness.’ . . . Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight. . . . Like men in a dark room they only felt their own existence surging in the darkness of other creatures” (Study of Thomas Hardy 165).The ego is “the sum total of what we conceive ourselves to be” (Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious/Fantasia of the Unconscious 28). Nietzsche labels the visual–verbal consciousness “Apollonian”; see The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) 33–6. 14. Jacques Derrida has made “logocentrism” a familiar term in modern theoretical discussions. For a discussion of “ocularcentrism,” see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). For an anthropological perspective on the visual and verbal bias in Western culture and on how other cultures differently value each of the senses, see David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). For a discussion of Lawrence’s critique of the Platonic connection between sight and intellect, see Barry J. Scherr, D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Plato: A Bloomian Interpretation (New York: Peter Lang, 1996) 59–79. 15. For example, Kate Millett supports her attack on Lady Chatterley’s Lover by citing masculinist statements made by Mellors, but she ignores passages that undercut those messages and fails to attend to broader intentional structures that undermine all dogmatic assertions made within the novel. See Sexual Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969) 237–45. 16. See Carol Siegel, Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991). 17. See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father:Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Literation (Boston: Beacon, 1973); Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk:Toward a Feminist Theory (Boston: Beacon, 1983); and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1989) xxi–xxiv. 18. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 14–26. Ellen Esrock points out that vision has

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Notes

actually been variously gendered in Western thought: while many thinkers masculinize the visual and the verbal, others (like Edmund Burke) feminize the visual and masculinize the verbal; see The Reader’s Eye:Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) 14–15. I believe that differential gender coding is probably connected to the Bible’s feminization of the pagan image (idol; graven image), and masculinization of God’s word (Hebrew Davar; Greek Logos). Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 34. My reader-centered approach to Lawrence is not Iserian, but is influenced by Iser’s work: Iser’s theoretical reflections on the interaction of text and reader are illuminating, and some of his terms, like “implied reader,” are useful. The dating of Lawrence’s first contact with esoteric ideas of the Theosophists is hard to pinpoint. Emile Delavenay says that “As early as 1908, Lawrence . . . takes his place mentally ‘inside’ a circle of socialists with a penchant for esoteric theories of consciousness”; see D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter 171. P.T.Whelan agrees with the 1908 date, while acknowledging the difficulty of establishing when the esoteric influence begins (104). The chief difficulty is that Lawrence’s first explicit mention of an esoteric text is in a letter dated August 24, 1917, written to Dr. David Eder, a pyschoanalyst with socialist sympathies; Lawrence wants to know if Eder has read “Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine” and comments that it is “In many ways a bore, and not quite real.Yet one can glean a marvellous lot from it, enlarge the understanding immensely”; see Letter 1442, Letters, vol. 3, 149–50.Yet the focus on Isis in his 1914 poem “Don Juan” may be influenced by Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Frieda Lawrence confirmed that her husband “read many of Mrs. Besant’s works,” but she was not able to specify which and when; see William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) 134. Barbara A. Miliaras demonstrates that an early source of Lawrence’s understanding of ancient and comparative religion is his maternal uncle, Fritz Krenkow. Krenkow was an Arabic and Semitic scholar who had close ties with the Cambridge anthropologists. Lawrence visited the Krenkows weekly between 1906 and 1910; see Pillar of Flame:The Mythological Foundations of D. H. Lawrence’s Sexual Philosophy (New York: Peter Lang, 1987) 12–15. Evelyn J. Hinz discusses Lawrence’s use of Jane Harrison’s work; see “Ancient Art and Ritual and The Rainbow,” Dalhousie Review 58.4 (Winter 1978–79) 617–37. Lawrence mentions Ancient Art and Ritual in an October 26, 1913 letter to Arthur McLeod; see Letter 667, Letters, vol. 2, 90. Frederick Carter offers an account of his correspondence and conversations with Lawrence (from 1923 to 1930) about mysticism, magic, and astrology; see D. H. Lawrence and the Body Mystical (London: Dennis Archer, 1932). See Helen P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols. (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1988 [1877]) and The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, 2 vols. ( Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1988 [1888]); Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom ( Wheaton, IL:Theosophical Publishing House, 1977 [1897]) 334–42 and Esoteric Christianity ( Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977 [1901]) 35–46, 126–31; James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York:Avenel, 1981 [1890]), vol. 2, 342–54; Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 [1903]) and Ancient Art and Ritual (London:William and Norgate, 1913). For a more recent discussion of the death–rebirth structure of initiation rites, see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans.Willard R.Trask (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). Failed couples sometimes undergo perverse initiation rites as when in Women in Love Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen are said to be “implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries” (242). Besant, Esoteric Christianity 17. Similarly, Emerson had asserted that the person who connects with “the oversoul” via his or her individual soul becomes divine. For a recent discussion of the divinity of the soul, see Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988) 75–128.

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24. Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 91, 105, 150–5. In her discussion of the early Church Fathers, Besant says that even “Origen distinctly places the Christian Mysteries in the same category as those of the Pagan world” (61). Lawrence’s belief in the initiatory power of his novels is also in line with that of Rudolf Steiner, a Theosophist who eventually founded Anthroposophy and inspired the Waldorf schools. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (1908), Steiner wrote about initiation and believed that his books had “living powers” that “work” on the reader’s “soul” and can transform the reader into a mystic seer. For a discussion of Lawrence’s possible knowledge of Steiner, see Whelan, Myth and Metaphysic 112–13. 25. See Otto The Idea of the Holy 61, 65. 26. The correspondence of spirit and nature—“as above, so below”—is a central tenet of the Hermetic tradition. Lawrence would have learned about Hermeticism through his reading of Blavatsky and Jung. For a discussion of Lawrence’s knowledge of Jung, see Whelan, Myth and Metaphysic 17–18. 27. Harrison, Prolegomena 154. 28. See Underhill, Mysticism 198–231. 29. Lawrence seems to have had no formal meditation practice. Rather, he strove to bring “acts of attention”—what Buddhists would call “mindfulness”—to the everyday events in his life. Often, he disparaged the sitting meditation practiced by devout Buddhists. On several occasions, he told Earl Brewster, who was very interested in Buddhism and who was Lawrence’s host in Ceylon in 1922, “Oh I wish he [the Buddha] would stand up!”; see Earl Brewster and Achsah Brewster, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (London: Martin Secker, 1934) 49. The Buddha had achieved enlightenment while sitting in meditation under a pipal tree.When living in New Mexico, Lawrence wrote to Brewster that “America has really just the opposite vibration from Asia—here one must act, or wither: and in Asia, it seems to me, one must meditate. I prefer this, because it is harder.—But I think action—continual rushing round in motorcars etc [sic]—can be much more silly than meditation” (Letter 3165, dated July 15, 1924, in Letters, vol. 5, 75). Despite Lawrence’s apparent dismissal of formal meditation, I believe that his writing practice, which he pursued with great regularity, mental focus, and emotional intensity, can be considered a kind of sitting meditation. And when the weather permitted, he often enjoyed composing while sitting under a tree; see Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1990) 113. The presence of Tantric Yoga in Women and Love and Lady Chatterley also suggest that he may have practiced Tantra with Frieda. Tantra is, in part, the Hindu and Buddhist art of sacred sexuality—a kind of fullbodied meditation; see Gerald Doherty, “The Darkest Source: D. H. Lawrence, Tantric Yoga, and Women in Love” Essays in Literature 11.2 (1984) 211–22; see also Doherty, “Connie and the Chakras: Yogic Patterns in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 13.1 (Spring 1980) 79–93. 30. Underhill argues that in the evolution of mystical consciousness, there are “great oscillations” between “the superficial and spiritual consciousness” (178). 31. Lawrence’s psychonarrations of nonverbal states differ from Joyce’s and Woolf ’s inner monologues of verbal thought. Dorrit Cohn argues that “a writer like Joyce, who gives us Bloom’s mind almost entirely in Bloom’s own words, reveals that he conceives of thought largely as verbalization”; see Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes of Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 79. 32. See Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. 2, 212–50; Besant, Esoteric Christianity, 22–3. 33. See Whelan’s discussion of Lawrence’s probable knowledge of Levi (106). Given the prominence of the Golden Dawn Society, I am speculating that Lawrence may have had some acquaintance with Mather’s translations and those of A. E.Waite. 34. See Schneider, The Artist as Psychologist 12–19. 35. For an extensive discussion of Lawrence’s knowledge of Eastern religions, see Doherty, Oriental Lawrence. 36. See Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious/Fantasia of the Unconscious 35, 54.

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Notes Chapter One The Destruction Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

1. The novel’s composition is most fully analyzed by Michael Squires in The Creation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Philip Weinstein also discusses the three versions of the novel in “Choosing Between the Quick and the Dead:Three Versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Modern Language Quarterley 43.3 (September 1982) 267–90. 2. D. H. Lawrence,“To Nancy Pearn,”April 12, 1927, Letter 3990, Letters, vol. 6, 29. 3. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) 74. 4. Two studies of Lady Chatterley suggest that the novel is structured by spatial symbolism. Julian Moynahan argues that the novel dramatizes an abstract, cerebral, and nonvital awareness when narrating the wood scenes, and a concrete, physical, and organic awareness when depicting episodes occurring in Wragby Hall and Tevershall; see The Deed of Life:The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) 140–72. H. M. Daleski also emphasizes the dramatization of two forms of consciousness, seeing the novel as tracing Connie’s “slow movement” from the “world” of Wragby and Tevershall to that of the wood; see The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) 258–311. In chapter 2, I show that discrete forms of narratorial and figural consciousness cannot be rigidly mapped. Indeed, before Connie meets Mellors, the wood does not evoke her bodily awareness. And as her initiation—and the reader’s—progresses, the more vital forms of consciousness occur more frequently and intensively, even outside the wood. 5. Michael Squires insightfully analyzes the novel’s general compositional strategies—which he calls the “question,” “discovery,” and “loop” methods—but he generally does not relate technique to authorial intention. In contrast, John Humma demonstrates that some of the metaphoric linkages in the novel support Lawrence’s belief in the interconnectedness of humans, animals, plants, and minerals; see Metaphor and Meaning in D. H. Lawrence’s Later Novels (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990) 85–99. In my view, these linkages are meant to produce more than merely conceptual ties: they facilitate the vitalization of the reader’s awareness, which is the subject of chapter 2. For a discussion of Lawrence’s understanding of the power of metaphor, see Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence:The Thinker as Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 6. See Joan D. Peters, “The Living and the Dead: Lawrence’s Theory of the Novel and the Structure of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence Review 20.1 (Spring 1988) 5–20. Her analysis mostly underscores differences in concreteness in the metaphors in the two halves. 7. Arthur Efron also thinks that “Peter’s sharp division of the novel is unworkable: there are major areas of text prior to the passage in Chapter 9 which could not easily be understood as Clifford’s mode of consciousness” (81); see “ ‘The Way Our Sympathy Flows and Recoils’: Lawrence’s Last Theory of the Novel,” Paunch 63–4 (December 1990) 71–84. 8. Gerald Doherty offers an insightful analysis of closed and open metaphors in Lady Chatterley (Theorizing Lawrence 17–18, 28, 87–109). I would argue that Lawrence generally uses open, “enlightened” (Doherty’s phrase) metaphors in the revitalization phase of the novel, and closed, “dead end” (Doherty’s phrase) metaphors in the destructive phase. 9. See Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) 151–64. 10. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1989 [1952]) 214–24 and xxi–xxiv. 11. See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969) 237–45. Millett claims that the phallus is presented as a moral and aesthetic standard and that the words “phallic” and “sexual” are interchangeable. I believe that the erotic passages involving Connie and Mellors implicitly valorize the female sexual organs and response. Moreover, Lawrence explicitly distinguishes “phallic” from “sexual”:“anyone who calls my novel a dirty sexual novel is a liar. It’s not

Notes

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

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even a sexual novel: it’s phallic. Sex is a thing in the head, its reactions are cerebral, and its processes mental.Whereas the phallic reality is warm and spontaneous”; see D. H. Lawrence,“To Curtis Brown,” March 15, 1928, Letter 4341, Letters, vol. 6, 326–7. Ed Jewinski demonstrates that, like Jacques Lacan, Lawrence uses the term “phallus” to convey “the complex of contradictory feelings and associations which converge on the tension between subject and object, male and female . . . personal and impersonal . . . human and inhuman”; see “The Phallus in D. H. Lawrence and Jacques Lacan,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.1 (Spring 1989) 15. These anti-sexist negational structures also occur in the novel’s sacralization phase, as we see in chapter 2. See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father:Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973); and Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983). See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 14–26. See Doherty for a comparison of the deconstructive approaches of Lawrence and Jacque Derrida (Theorizing Lawrence 146ff ). See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 1979). In “Morality and the Novel” (1925), Lawrence says:“Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent.There will always be resistance.The same with new pictures, new music.You may judge of their reality by the fact that they do arouse a certain resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence” (Study of Thomas Hardy 175). In Kabbalah, one of the metaphors for evil is a shell, bark, covering, or coating (klippah) that encloses and isolates an individual from the greater unity of being. Lawrence’s uses of Kabbalah is discussed in chapter 3. Alex Zwerdling shows that Virginia Woolf realized that her satiric bent was in conflict with the requirements of psychological fiction. Her commitment to rendering complex characters made her a restrained, inventive, and “reluctant satirist”; see Virginia Woolf and the Real World ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 38–61. Ken Wilber argues that every dualism involves a rejection, projection, and repression: undesired attributes of the whole are projected onto the rejected part, and the original unity is repressed. See The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1977) 106. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978). Foucault defines an “episteme” as “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems”; see The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans.A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) 191. See also Lydia Blanchard,“Lawrence, Foucault, and the Language of Sexuality,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”, ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 17–35. Doherty emphasizes that science uses closed metaphors to describe and explain sexuality.The closed metaphors reductively contain the meanings of sexuality (Oriental Lawrence 9). George Orwell,“Politics and the English Language,” Horizon (April 1946). T. S. Eliot, following Mallarme, would later refer to the poet’s task of “purify[ing] the dialect of the tribe”; see Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1943) 54. Rupert Birkin makes the distinction between “sensuous” and “sensual” when referring to selfconscious and unselfconscious forms of awareness; he uses the phrase “physical consciousness” to describe decadent forms of bodily awareness; see Women in Love 45, 79. See Philip Rieff, Freud:The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) 5–6. For a discussion of Lawrence’s critique of Freud’s reductive analysis of the unconscious, see Fiona Becket, D. H. Lawrence:The Thinker as Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) 49–69.

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27. P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum:A Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and P. D. Ouspensky (New York: Knopf, 1981 [1920]) 197. 28. Lawrence would have read a powerful critique of positivitistic science in Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum 97. 29. For Lawrence’s critique of Proust and Joyce, see “The Future of the Novel” in Study of Thomas Hardy 151–5. 30. George Lukacs argues that protagonists in modernist novels often exist in but do not significantly interact with a static, distorted outside world. He explains that their psychic insulation is due to their failure to distinguish between abstract and concrete potentialities: they substitute imagined potentialities for the actual complexity of reality, Faulkner’s protagonists being paradigmatic. See George Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1962). Lawrence also considered the replacement of action by thought a cause of the modern malaise. 31. Lacan emphasizes that the child’s bodily reflection/image is idealized and that this ideal image becomes the basis of identity: “The mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body in relation to the still very profound lack of co-ordination of his own motility; it represents an ideal unity, a salutary imago; it is invested with all the original distress resulting from the child’s inter-organic and relational discordance.” Cited in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) 80. 32. In “Art and Morality”(1925), Lawrence also uses microscope, telescope, and camera metaphors to describe the isolating ocularcentrism of modernity:“We have achieved universal vision. Even god could not see differently from what we see: only more extensively, like a telescope, or more intensively, like a microscope” (Study of Thomas Hardy 165). Psychologists use the term “visual capture” to refer to the continued reliance on sight for identifying an object even when information from the other senses impel a different identification. 33. See Mulvey,“Visual Pleasure” 18–22. 34. Michel Foucault discusses the controlling, registering powers of panoptic surveillance in Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979) 195–228. 35. According to John Burnet, whose work on the pre-Socratic philosophers significantly influenced Lawrence, “curiosity” is etymologically related to “culture”; see Early Greek Philosophy (London: A & C Black, 1930 [1892]) 83. Lawrence read Burnet’s book in July 1915; see Rose Marie Burwell, “A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading,” A D. H. Lawrence Handbook, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) 83. 36. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 26–33. 37. Julia Kristeva defines chora as mobile psychosomatic articulations that can shape poetic language: “We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral states . . . the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm. . . . The chora is a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.” See The Kristeva Reader, ed.Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 93–4. 38. According to Laura Mulvey,“[t]he first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (21–2). 39. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: New American Library, 1958 [1902]) 123–4. 40. For a discussion of the role of negation in modernist literature, see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990) 35–44. 41. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence also insists on the difference in kind between organic and mechanical force: “the vital-creative activity and the mechanico-material

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activity . . . are unthinkably different” (43). Ouspensky also stresses that “the phenomena of life and . . . of consciousness contain something which is absent in physical phenomena” (112). 42. This is one reason why Joan Peters is unjustified in claiming that the “Clifford” narrator is confined to the novel’s first half.

Chapter Two The Revitalization Phase of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1. Gerald Doherty persuasively equates the seven sex scenes in the wood with the seven-stage initiation process that Lawrence discusses in Apocalypse; see “Connie and the Chakras: Yogic Patterns in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 13.1 (Spring 1980) 60. According to this reading, each episode corresponds to the opening, conquest, and transfiguration of one of the seven “great psychic centers” of “dynamic consciousness” in Connie’s body. Doherty argues that these centers are the seven Hindu chakras, which are centers of energy and consciousness. See also Gerald Doherty, Oriental Lawrence:The Quest for the Secrets of Sex (New York: Peter Lang, 2001) 123–37. 2. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence says that “Now our business is to realise sex. Today, the full conscious realisation of sex is even more important than the act itself. . . . The mind has to catch up, in sex” (Lady Chatterley’s Lover 308). 3. Roland Barthes also values texts that seek to integrate the reader’s mind and body: “the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text. . . . The important thing is to equalize the field of pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical life and contemplative life.The pleasure of the text is just that: claim lodged against the separation of the text; for what the text says . . . is the ubiquity of pleasure”; see The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 58–9. 4. See “Pornography and Obscenity” (Late Essays 43ff ) for Lawrence’s attack on masturbation. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he tries to distinguish his “clean” motives from the presumably “dirty” one of pornographers: “And this is the point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly” (Lady Chatterley’s Lover 308). For a discussion of Lawrence’s view of masturbation, see James C. Cowan, “Lawrence, Freud and Masturbation,” Mosaic 28.1 (March 1995) 69–98; see also Peter H. Balbert, “The Coming of Lady Chatterley: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination,” D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry T. Moore (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) 148–50. For an analysis of Lawrence’s view of pornography, see J. M. Coetzee, “The Taint of the Pornographic: Defending (Against) Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Mosaic 21.1 (Winter 1988) 1–11. 5. Gerald Doherty argues that in Lawrence’s essays the sexual act is represented as expressing the tension between metonymic and metaphoric modes of sex, while in his fiction,“the metaphoric imperative often seems to prevail”; see “The Art of Appropriation:The Rhetoric of Sexuality in D. H. Lawrence,” Style 30.2 (Summer 1996) 289–308. Doherty asserts that the metaphoric mode, which involves transfers and transformations, emphasizes phallic “entry and takeover, penetration and conquest” of the female body; it “configures a (male) act of appropriation that locates the female as the fascinating yet alien territory awaiting exploration and domination” (290). In contrast, the metonymic mode stresses separation, hierarchy, instrumentality, fetishism, masturbatory self-enclosure. “The fetishistic closeup” (“the amplified detailing of body-parts”) is a common metonymic mode used in pornographic literature (296). See also Chapter 2 of Doherty’s Theorizing Lawrence. 6. Fire and water are the central elements in Heraclitus’s metaphysics, a major influence on Lawrence. For a discussion of Heraclitus’s influence on Lawrence, see Mara Kalnins,“Symbolic

168

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

Notes

Seeing: Lawrence and Heraclitus,” D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, ed. Mara Kalnins (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986) 173–90; see also Robert Montgomery, The Visionary Art of D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 132–67. Mark Kinkead-Weekes emphasizes that Lawrence’s reading of Heraclitus “confirmed and extended his thinking [about the idea of human being as process of continual change] rather than originating it”; see D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 811 (note 82). I believe that gender differences in reader responses are largely due to social, not biological, differences between male and female readers. Gender differences in socialization may produce differences in reader strategies, identifications, interpretations, and emotive responses. I mention all of these numbers because a subsidiary aim of my analysis is to demonstrate how number symbolism plays an important role in the novel’s design. Several critics writing on the sex scenes have emphasized the general importance of the number seven, but I have found no one who discusses the significance of the twelve discrete intercourses. Nor have I found any investigator who distinguishes between the pattern established in the first four scenes and the anti-pattern set up in the last three. Doherty argues that the first four sexual encounters focus on “the defeat of upper-chakra activity” while the last three “draw more specifically on a Yogic dynamics” and so “a precise chakra subtext underwrites each encounter” (Oriental Lawrence 131). It could be argued that Mellors combines the initiatory roles of both Ramon and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent, but it is apparent that he enacts only a weak version of these roles. In the Mexico novel, Ramon is the principal initiator–priest–prophet–god while Cipriano is his functionary-cum-god who attempts to initiate Kate. Although Mellors is an ideologue like Ramon, and a lover like Cipriano, his ideological and erotic roles are considerably diminished. This mitigating and humanizing of Mellors’s power is in line with Dukes’s statement that “One has to be human, and have a heart and a penis, if one is going to escape being either a god or a Bolshevist—for they are the same thing: they’re both too good to be true” (39).The humanization of Mellors contrasts starkly with the deification of Ramon, who eventually incarnates Quetzalcoatl.Thus, in moving from The Plumed Serpent to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we see a shift in emphasis from permanent identity with divinity to periodic identification with the sacred energy experienced through relationship. Significantly, this mix of soft and hard is how Ovid characterizes the human race in Metamorphoses. In the Ovidian tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, a new human race emerges after the flood from stones thrown on the earth by the pious couple. It is only after the stones soften and become more tender that human forms appear. The association between Lawrence and Ovid is not accidental: both authors revere passion, eroticism, and self-transformation, emphasize the close ties between humans and animals, and base their dialectical metaphysics largely on Heraclitus. This imagistic confusion is the visual analog of the conceptual confusion produced by the verbal paradoxes—the koans—of Zen Buddhism.The function of the koans is to lock up the meditator’s conceptual mind and evoke nondual awareness. Lawrence may well have learned about koans from his friend Earl Brewster. For a recent discussion of koans, see Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 69–87. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence writes that: “[M]arriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in the rhythm of days, in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of quarters, of years, of decades and of centuries” (Lady Chatterley’s Lover 324). Ed Jewinski shows that Lawrence uses the term “phallic” in much the same symbolic way that Jacques Lacan does:“For both writers, the term . . . adequately conveys the complex of contradictory feelings and associations which converge on the tension between subject and object, male and female . . . fullness and lack” and other polarities. See “The Phallus in D. H. Lawrence and Jacques Lacan,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 21.1 (Spring 1989) 15.

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13. Lawrence describes this impersonal self as the “carbon” self underlying the various “allotropic states” of the social or personal self, which is “the old stable ego”; see Letter 732, “To Edward Garnett,” June 5, 1914, Letters, vol. 2, 183. The carbon self is rooted in the present-centered feelings, sensations, and intuitions of the body. For a recent discussion of how the infant’s vibrant, nondual self develops into an adult ego cut off from its own vitality, see A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence:Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization (Berkeley: Diamond Books, 1996) 142–5. 14. Gerard Genette uses the term “focalization” instead of “point of view,” “vision,” or “field” because he wants to “avoid the specifically visual connotations” of the latter terms; see Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) 188–9.Tzvetan Todorov discusses the various perspectival distinctions; see Introduction to Poetics, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 32–8. 15. For a discussion of the differences between immanent and transcendental encounters, see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: Image, 1990 [1910]) 35–43; see also Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944). For a discussion of the differences between immanent and transcendental encounters in Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and the analogs in Sufi mysticism, see Fereshten Zangenehpour, Sufism and the Quest for Fulfillment in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” (Goteborg, Sweden:Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2000). 16. The hand as connector is also stressed in Milton’s account of Adam and Eve: “[Eve tells Adam:]. . . With that thy gentle hand / Seiz’d mine, I yielded, and from that time see / How beauty is excell’d by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (Paradise Lost IV: 488–91). 17. In “The Reality of Peace” (1917), Lawrence says it is peace to follow one’s deepest impulses and thereby rest or sleep upon the tide of one’s life; living one’s life is conceived as a sea voyage motivated by desire and assisted by will and understanding (Reflections on the Death 28). 18. James C. Cowan also understands Connie’s “sleep-like state as a symbolic death of her mental life presaging a resurrection of the body”; see “D. H. Lawrence and the Resurrection of the Body,” D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry T. Moore (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) 101. 19. In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence underscores the balancing or regulating function of the Holy Ghost (73). 20. Together, the water and the fire constitute the poles of Lawrence’s quasi-Heraclitean metaphysics.The bird is also an important symbol because its wings signify the cosmic polarities while its body stands for the divine fulcrum or balancer; moreover, the bird is also associated with the sky, which in turn is associated with the sun and the Heraclitean fire. Mellors’s stirring penis was also figured as a “live bird” (126), indicating that penis and bird are both bridge symbols, as in “the phallic bridge.” 21. See Evelyn Underhill’s discussion of Christian meditative techniques (298–357). For an analysis of Eastern meditation methods, see Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1977) 286–357. Underhill identifies three phases or types of Christian meditation: recollection (focusing attention), quiet (suspending thought), and contemplation (unitive experience). These phases correspond to those that Wilbur finds in Eastern methods: active attention, stopping of mental chatter, and passive awareness. For a recent discussion of the cognitive and emotive impact of mental imagery, see Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye:Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Esrock cites various psychological studies which show that visual imaging during reading generally increases the clarity, vividness, concreteness, memorability, and comprehension of a narrated scene and intensifies the emotional response to that scene (188–94). James Hillman offers a neo-Jungian perspective on the vivifying power of visual images; he, like Blake, stresses the transformative power of anthropomorphic images (personifications), while Lawrence emphasizes the potency of theriomorphic and elemental images; see Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) 1–51. Gerald Doherty examines Lawrence’s use of metaphor to convey a sense of

170 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Notes

transcendence and transformation in “Death and the Rhetoric of Representation in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love,” Mosaic 27.1 (March 1994) 55–72. Impermanence (anicca) is, according to Buddhist tradition, one of the three characteristics of existence. The other two are: suffering (dukkha) and absence of permanent identity or soul (anatta). Gerald Doherty demonstrates that Lawrence’s “engagement with Buddhism spans the complete period of his writing life, from 1908 to 1929”; see “The Nirvana Dimension: D. H. Lawrence’s Quarrel with Buddhism,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 15.1–2 (1987) 51 and Doherty Oriental Lawrence 15–47. For a discussion of his knowledge of Tantric Yoga, which is a body-centered meditation practiced by Buddhists and Hindus, see Doherty, Oriental Lawrence 83–9, 123–37; Doherty,“The Darkest Source: D. H. Lawrence,Tantric Yoga, and Women in Love,” Essays in Literature 11.2 (1984) 211–22; and Doherty, “Connie and the Chakras.” With the exception of the works on Tantric Yoga that Doherty cites, I have been unable to find other texts read by Lawrence which discuss Eastern meditation practices. Recent studies of Buddhist meditation offer a sense of what Lawrence might have learned about the nature and experience of meditation; see Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness; see also Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation (Boston and London: Shambala, 1987). Following Nietzsche, Roland Barthes asserts that “a true science of becoming”—including a science of literary criticism—has to acknowledge the “absolute flow of becoming,” which means that every form is constantly changing; we only affirm a form as “permanent” because we lack the perceptual “subtlety” to detect the changes that are always occurring in that form (60–1). Nietzsche’s ideas of becoming and impermanence were deeply influenced by Buddhism. The narrator says that Connie “soon learnt to hold him [Michaelis], to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over” (29). Robert Alter has demonstrated that:“Broadly, when repetitions with significant variations occur in biblical narrative, the changes introduced can point to an intensification, climactic development, acceleration, of the actions and attitudes initially represented, or, on the other hand, to some unexpected, perhaps unsettling, new revelation of character or plot”; see The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981) 97–8. Lawrence sees this “rotary image-thought” in the spiralling “logic of action” of the Greeks or the “curious image-association” of “the orientals” and the Psalms (Apocalypse 52, 54–5). Doherty links this form of image-thought to Yogic visualization practices (Oriental Lawrence 94–5). The phrase “utterly still,” a combination of utterance and silence suggests the “speaking silence” which the Talmud identifies with intermediate levels of prophesy. This phrase appears in Ezekiel’s Merkavah (Chariot) vision (Ezekiel I:28). For a recent discussion of the traditional meanings of the phrase, see Aryeh Kaplan, Meditation and the Bible (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1978) 41. The lava metaphor combines the metaphors of fire and water, signifying that her new self represents a fusion of flame force and oceanic-earthly energy. The volcano metaphor is more explicit in The First Lady Chatterley; the volcanic self is conceived as an impassioned, moving, transformed, and transforming body. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, the volcano metaphor suggests a hot, active sensuality, whereas the sea metaphor indicates a tender, passive one. In the destructive phase, the narrator says that for Connie and Hilda “the sex thing” involves “a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme” (8). It is appropriate that the couple experience heaven on earth during the seventh coupling, for the seventh day of Creation, the Sabbath Day, is, according to Jewish tradition, a time when eternity is tasted. Moreover, when a man has sexual relations with his wife on the Sabbath, he fulfills two commandments with one act. Lawrence may have learned about the mystical significance of the Sabbath by reading the work of A. E.Waite, a Hermeticist who wrote extensively

Notes

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

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about Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah); see Whelan 106, 117, 165. For a fuller discussion of the esoteric significance of the Sabbath, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s & The Sabbath (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 13–24 and David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 54. Similarly, Underhill emphasizes that while the “surface-consciousness” is inhibited during mystical connection, it “becomes aware when it awakes” of “the definite somewhat which takes place during . . . [its] inhibition” (357). These more general concepts also represent narratorial or authorial interpretations of the specific activities being represented. Nearly all of Lawrence’s writings show he preferred to suggest his own interpretations, usually through a narrator or protagonist, rather than grant readers complete interpretive freedom. But to counterbalance this tendency, he distinguished in his aesthetics between the teller and the tale and encouraged readers to trust the latter (Studies in Classic American Literature 14). Despite this admonition, he, like Nietzsche, understood the idiosyncratic and arbitrary dimensions of interpretation, and evidently wanted to minimize the likelihood readers would miss the religious value of the forms of knowing and being he concretely dramatized in his tales.And while he did not believe in a single, correct, or definitive interpretation of experience, he almost certainly believed in misguided, dysfunctional, or weak interpretations.The general ideas thus serve to keep readers from making such “bad” readings. “Good” readings are those that have the effect of healing, integrating, and invigorating the reader’s consciousness. Lawrence thought that readings that reduce a work of art to “its didactic capacity” are equivalent to scientific explanations that reduce humans to their “physicalfunctional capacity” (see The Symbolic Meaning in Studies in Classic American Literature 169). Nietzsche also emphasized the essential need for ridicule. Lydia Blanchard has argued that in Lady Chatterley, Lawrence is “both creating a language of feeling and calling into question that language”; see “Lawrence, Foucault, and the Language of Sexuality,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”:A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 31. However, in contrast to my reading, Blanchard interprets even the most vivid passages, like the third sex scene, as parodic. Tommy Dukes says, “It’s an amusing idea, Charlie, . . . that sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.—I suppose it’s quite true” (33–4). The narrator says that “He [Michaelis] was a curious and very gentle lover, very gentle with the woman, trembling uncontrollably, and yet at the same time detached, aware, aware of every sound outside” (26). For a discussion of the sacral center of consciousness, see Doherty, “Connie and the Chakras” and Oriental Lawrence (123–37). In “The Reality of Peace” (1917), Lawrence stresses the need to understand and make peace with shame, justifying the satisfaction of shameful desires with the Nietzschean credos that we are fundamentally creatures of desire and that excess is a sign of strength (Reflections on the Death 36). H. M. Daleski finds the scene unconvincing and argues that Lawrence’s temperamental preference for “the female principle” prevented him from persuasively and positively representing a masculinist intercourse devoid of tenderness; see The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) 309. Rosemarie Davies thinks the episode reflects Mellors’s “death-oriented side”; see “The Eighth Love Scene: The Real Climax of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence Review 15.1–2 (Spring–Summer 1982) 173. Gavriel Ben Ephraim asserts that in this scene Mellors is “simplified into a one-dimensional figure”; see “The Achievement of Balance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”:A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 151. For example, in two short, successive paragraphs in Chapter I, “sex” is repeated six times: “sex business . . . sexual love . . . sex thing . . . sex . . . sex thing . . . sexual intercourse” (7–8). The insistent repetition serves to underscore the meaningless of modern eroticism, to indicate the term’s ubiquitous presence in scientific and popular discourse, and to hammer away at the reader’s conventional orientation toward sexuality.

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Notes

41. For a discussion of the novel’s literary allusions, see Dennis Jackson,“Literary Allusions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”:A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 170–96. 42. Readers may well interpret the episode’s abstract rhetoric as reflecting not Connie’s fears but Lawrence’s own anxieties about anal intercourse: his overly intellectualized attempt to make himself and readers comfortable with a viscerally felt taboo. Certainly, the stiff style may be an attempt to evade censorship: Lawrence knew that if he used specific experiential language in this episode, the book would never be published. But he could have tried to evade censorship by rendering the passage in highly evocative metaphorical language, as he did in earlier sex scenes; this would have given readers an emotional experience of the exchange while avoiding anatomical specificity. The fact that he chose rhetorical over poetic language suggests that the rhetoric was not just the result of a literary compromise to avoid censorship; rather, the rhetorical discourse is supposed to reflect Connie’s fears, which prevent her from fully participating in the encounter by calling up her intellectualizing defenses. 43. E.A. Burtt, The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (New York: Mentor, 1955) 49–50.

Chapter Three Transformative Uses of Kabbalistic Concepts and Terms in The Rainbow 1. For a history of the novel’s composition, see Charles L. Ross, The Composition of “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love”:A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). 2. For a discussion of the dating of Lawrence’s knowledge of anthropology and Theosophy, see note 20 in the introduction. 3. Mark Kinkead-Weekes also sees the generational movement as a falling away from the religious sense into the historical sense, associated with rational skepticism and scientific materialism; see “The Sense of History in The Rainbow,” D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (London: Macmillan, 1989) 129–30. Robert Burden discusses Lawrence’s use of various historical discourse in Radicalizing Lawrence (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000) 87–147. 4. Evelyn J. Hinz makes the opposite argument, claiming that the novel’s structure reflects a pattern of eternal recurrence rather than one of historical change; see “The Paradoxical Fall: Eternal Recurrence in The Rainbow,” D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988) 81–96. She stresses the repetitive elements in each generation but does not take into account differences in the frequency or intensity of their deployment. Thus, the fact that the metaphors of struggle occur more frequently in destructive contexts in the more modern generations indicates that there has been a change in the pattern of Brangwen interactions. Further, while Diane Bonds has argued that the novel presents two conflicting models of self—one differential, one organic—she does not see that the two models are linked to two contrasting modes of consciousness; see Diane S. Bonds, Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978).According to Bonds, the organic model depicts the self as anterior to and independent of consciousness and as directly knowable by intuition while the differential model portrays the self as an effect of differentiating relations with the other and as knowable only indirectly and inferentially (21). I argue that the organic model is associated with the integrated consciousness that Lawrence is trying to evoke in the reader and that the differential model is linked to the split consciousness, dominated by vision and language, that he is attempting to purge. Fiona Beckett argues that “the wave” is the central metaphor of feeling and style in The Rainbow; see D. H. Lawrence:The Thinker as Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997) 126, 134. Stefania Michelucci discusses the alternation of centripetal and centrifugal movements in The Rainbow in relation to regressive and evolutionary development; see Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence ( Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and

Notes

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

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Co., 2002) 75ff. Finally, Jack Stewart offers an interesting discussion of The Rainbow as expressionistic art in The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Visions and Expression (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) 51ff. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: Image Books, 1990 [1910]) 176–97. For an account of Lawrence’s traumatic experience of World War I, see Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare:The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978). P.T.Whelan discusses a few Kabbalistic resonances in the novel, but his treatment is partial and often does not explain Lawrence’s transvaluation of terms; see D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988) 106–7, 117–22, 165. “Pantheism” means “all [is] God” while “panentheism” means “all [things] in God.” Gershom Scholem points out that the term “panentheism” was coined in the nineteenth century to indicate the idea that “All is comprehended within the Godhead but not everything is identical with it”; see Kabbalah (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) 147.According to Scholem, some Kabbalists incline toward pantheism, others toward panentheism. See Helen P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (Pasadena:Theosophical University Press, 1988 [1877]), vols. 1 and 2; Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine:The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Pasadena:Theosophical University Press, 1988 [1888]); Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977 [1897]) and Esoteric Christianity (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966 [1901]); and A. E. Waite, The Holy Kabbalah (New York: Citadel, 1991 [1912]). See also Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic, trans. A. E. Waite (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1972 [1896]). For Lawrence’s acquaintance with Theosophical literature, see P. T. Whelan, Myth and Metaphysic 104–6. See S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1993 [1887]) and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (New York: Dover, 1975 [1900]). Possible sources of Lawrence’s understanding of the sephirotic system are Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. 2, 212–50; Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled 1–42;Waite, The Holy Kabbalah 191–6; and Levi, Transcendental Magic 95–103.These authors give alternative translations of the Hebrew names of the sephirot (e.g.,“Gevurah” is translated as “Strength,”“Severity,”“Power”); Lawrence seems to have chosen “Power” and “Love” as the translations of “Gevurah” and “Chesed.” For an influential study of the impact of Lawrence’s family experience on the gendering of his symbols, see H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). See Gerald Doherty, Oriental Lawrence:The Quest for the Secrets of Sex (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). Feresten Zangenehpour identifies some interesting parallels with the Sufi tradition; see Sufism and the Quest for Fulfilment in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” (Gotesborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2000). Interestingly, Hindu thought also uses an inverted tree to figure the manifest divinity. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled 224, 213.Virginia Hyde offers an interesting analysis of Biblical typology, including the type of Adam, in The Rainbow and Women in Love; see The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology (University Park:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). The Shekhinah “resides only where the man is united to the woman”; she is “the glory which cohabits and indwells, during the external act [of sexual intercourse]”; “it is in uniting bodies and souls that the two [man and woman] become one; man in particular is termed one and perfect; he draws down the Holy Spirit upon him and is called the Son of the Holy One, blessed be He”;“the Supreme Wisdom is a Mystery of Sex” (Waite 354–5, 381–3). Raphael Patai traces the development of the concept of the Shekhinah, emphasizing how she takes on the qualities of the pagan goddesses that the ancient Hebrews sought to deny and denigrate. In effect, she represents the return of the repressed feminine in Judaism. See The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1990).

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Notes

18. See Waite, The Holy Kabbalah 352. 19. Ibid. 356. 20. “We know by the scriptural account that in the temple of Solomon the Shekinah continued to repose between the wings of the Kerubim. She is described as resident throughout the Holy of Holies” (Waite 357). 21. Waite also connects Shekhinah and Crown when he says that “She [Shekhinah] is . . . the crown of the seven lower Sephiroth” (347). In effect, Shekhinah, at the bottom of Primal Adam (or the Tree of Life), mirrors the Crown at the top; Shekhinah, the last sephira, is “the synthesis of all the Sephiroth,” while the Crown, the first sephirah, contains all the subsequent sephirot. Blavatsky refers to the Shekhinah as “the feminized Holy Ghost”; see Isis Unveiled 223. Lawrence also conflates Crown (or even Ein Sof) with Presence in The Symbolic Meaning, the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature: “The religious truth is the same now as it ever has been: that preceding all our knowledge or will or effort is the central creative mystery, out of which issues the strange and for ever unaccountable emanation of creation: that the universe is a bush which burns for ever with the Presence, consuming itself and yet never consumed. . . . Central is the mystery of Now, the creative mystery, what we have called the Godhead” (182). In Kabbalah, the burning bush is associated with the Crown because at the bush Moses heard the divine name “I will be what I will be.” 22. The Crown is also called “Ayin-Nothingness.” When the letter of “Ayin” are rearranged, they form the word “Ani-I,” which is a name of Shekhinah. Thus, the divine Nothingness realizes itself as an Identity, an I. 23. T. R. Wright calls The Rainbow “a kind of counter-Bible”; see D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 85. 24. In The Symbolic Meaning, Lawrence explains the Fall as the loss of the original integrity and harmony of the psyche (127). 25. Waite, The Holy Kabbalah, 358. 26. See Whelan, Myth and Metaphysic 113, 123–4, 178. 27. In “Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence says that in Correggio “Art now passes from the naive, intuitive stage, to the state of knowledge. The female impulse, to feel and to live in feeling, is now embraced by the male impulse—to know. . . . Correggio leads on to the whole of modern art, where the male still wrestles with the female, in unconscious struggle, but where he gains ever gradually over her, reducing her to nothing. . . . Ever man is more and more occupied with his own experience . . . less and less aware of anything unknown, more and more preoccupied with that which he knows, till his knowledge tends to become an abstraction because it is limited by no unknown” (Study of Thomas Hardy 67–8). 28. Letter to 828 to Gordon Campbell, dated December 20, 1914, in Letters, vol. 2, 249. 29. The Hebrew word “Adam” is both a masculine and a gender-neutral noun. 30. Michael Bell shows how Lawrence’s language in key passages resists stylistic mastery and analytic syntax; see D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 51–96. 31. Michel Foucault argues that the distinctive categories of sex and sexuality were created in the nineteenth century; see The History of Sexuality:An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978). 32. In Apocalypse, Lawrence associates the seven seals with the seven Kabbalistic levels and considers the Book of Revelation to be an account of Jesus’ esoteric initiation. In The Man Who Died, Lawrence fully eroticizes and initiates Jesus, who has a brief but significant sexual interlude with the priestess of Isis. 33. See Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled 27–35 and Waite, The Holy Kabbalah, 206–7. 34. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled 223, 222. 35. Ibid. 229. 36. See Underhill, Mysticism 298–357. 37. See Besant, Esoteric Christianity 31–3. 38. A. E.Waite refers to the Ein Sof (Infinite God) as “the subsistent state of Deity itself ” (189).

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39. The door metaphor is also central to Blake, who believed that “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite.”While Lawrence affirmed Blake’s emphasis on energy and on the sacredness of all things, he rejected Blake’s high estimation of intellectual activity. 40. “[I]n the temple of Solomon the Shekinah continued to repose between the wings of the Kerubim” (Waite 357). 41. During the Rabbinic period after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, many of the Temple rites were transferred to the home. This transfer elevated the religious role of the family in Jewish life. Lawrence’s linking of house and Temple thus has historical implications: it suggests that we live in a time when divinity ought to be manifest in daily, domestic living. 42. For a discussion of Lawrence’s view of the late nineteenth century, see Kinkead-Weekes, “The Sense of History” 122–30. 43. See Study of Thomas Hardy 66–77. 44. Lawrence plays with the phrase “I am I” in Fantasia of the Unconscious (75). 45. “[F]rom this eternal and infinite light (which to us is darkness) was emitted a spiritual substance. This was the First Sephiroth, containing in herself the other nine” (Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled 213). Mathers explains the creative power of the Ein Sof in terms of the “potential existence” inherent in a “seed”; moreover, Ein Sof contains the sephirot just as “the germs contain the development” (19, 39). 46. The hub-wheel metaphor is also used in the “Study of Thomas Hardy” to describe the sexual union of female and male (Study of Thomas Hardy 52–61).The male is associated with “the Willto-Motion,” and the female with “the Will-to-Intertia.” 47. Scholem says that “Ein-Sof is often (not always) identified with the Aristotelian ‘cause of all causes,’ and, through the kabbalistic use of neoplatonic idiom, with the ‘root of all roots’ ” (89). In The Kabbalah Unveiled, Mathers associates the Crown, not the Ein Sof, with the center; the Ein Sof is “the centerless [limitless ocean of negative light] . . . [that] concentrates a centre, which is . . . the Crown” (20). In Kabbalistic literature, the Crown is often conflated with Ein Sof.There are at least two reasons for this: Crown is the first manifestation of Ein Sof and so is highly identified with it; moreover, one of the alternative names for Crown is “Ayin,” which has the same root as “Ein” (or “Ayn”). 48. Diane Bonds discusses the importance of the word “utterance” in Lawrence’s theories of self and language (7–12). 49. See Letter 828 in Letters, vol. 2, 249. 50. Levi says that “there exists in Nature a force . . . [that] consists in a Universal Agent having equilibrium for its supreme law”; “absolute liberty cannot exist apart from perfect equilibrium”;“the universe is balanced by two forces which maintain it in equilibrium, being the force which attracts and that which repels.They exist alike in physics, in philosophy and in religion” (12, 79, 40). Levi associates the Universal Agent with the “body of the Holy Spirit,”“the soul of the world” and “the symbol of a serpent devouring its tail” (42). For Lawrence, the self-devouring serpent does not symbolize equilibrium; rather it signifies the breakdown of equilibrium: “the unconsummated soul, unsatisfied, uncreated in part . . . seek[ing] to make itself whole by bringing the whole world under its one order, will seek to make itself absolute and timeless by devouring its opposite. . . . This is the infinite with its tail in its mouth” (Study of Thomas Hardy 267). 51. See Levi, Transcendental Magic 29. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 28. 54. Underhill, Mysticism 71. 55. Letter 1435,“To Waldo Frank,” July 27, 1917, Letters, vol. 3, 143. 56. The unnamed Brangwen woman in the first chapter observes that it is the vicar’s knowledge which gives him “power over her husband” (44). Pondering what it is that “makes a man strong even if he be little and frail in body,” she concludes that “it was a question of knowledge” (44). Lawrence may have been influenced by Nietzsche’s principle that mental strength ultimately defeats physical strength, a principle forcefully stated in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

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Notes Chapter Four Mechanistic and Yogic Discourses in Women in Love

1. See George H. Ford, Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) 168. A recent advocate of this view is Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 97–132. On January 16, 1920, Lawrence wrote to Martin Secker that “The Rainbow and Women in Love are really an organic artistic whole, I cannot but think it would be well to issue them as Women in Love,Vol I and Vol II”; see Letter 1908, The Letters, vol. 3, 459. On December 21, 1916, Lawrence had written Arthur McLeod that Women in Love “is a sequel to the Rainbow, but very different”; see Letter 1339, Letters, vol. 3, 61. 2. See P. T. Whelan, D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988) 175–82. 3. In “The Crown,” Lawrence says:“We go into a war like this, in order to get once more the final reduction under the touch of death . . . this sort of self-inflicted Sadism, brings almost a final satisfaction to our civilised and still passionate men” (Reflections on the Death 289–90). Some of his pessimism and rage was also related to the suppression of The Rainbow in November 1915. For a discussion of Lawrence’s experience of the war years, see Paul Delany, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare:The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Dies Irae is one of the novel’s early titles; others include “The Wedding Ring,”“Noah’s Ark,” and “The Latter Days”; see Charles L. Ross, The Composition of “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love”: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). 4. On September 4, 1916, Lawrence wrote to S. S. Koteliansky that “I must say I hate mankind— talking of hatred, I have got a perfect androphobia. . . . I think truly the only righteousness is the destruction of mankind, as in Sodom”; see Letter 1279, Letters, vol. 2, 650. For a discussion of the apocalyptic aspects of Lawrence’s preoccupation with annihilation, see Sarah Urang, Kindled in the Flame:The Apocalyptic Scene in D. H. Lawrence (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). 5. Lawrence thought that many of the wars conducted by the Roman Empire were motivated by a “natural love of justice” and that even “the most cruel or foolish” emperors and governors “could see what was true or right, though they did not choose to act upon it” (Movements in European History 12). 6. See Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969). 7. Letter 1435, Letters, vol. 3, 143. Lawrence explains that:“The Rainbow . . . was all written before the war, though revised during Sept. and Oct. of 1914. I don’t think the war had much to do with it—I don’t think the war altered it, from its pre-war statement. . . . There is a great consummation in death, or sensual ecstasy, as in The Rainbow. But there is also death which is the rushing of the Gadarene swine down the slope of extinction.And this is the war in Europe.We have chosen our extinction in death, rather than our consummation” (ibid. 142–3). This “extinction in death” is portrayed in Women in Love. 8. Scott Sanders argues that the novel is “pitched at the same elite to whom Lawrence continually appealed in his letters, the elite of the educated and the affluent”; see D. H. Lawrence:The World of the Major Novels (London: Vision Press, 1975) 120. 9. For example, H. M. Daleski finds the erotic exchanges between Birkin and Ursula “unsatisfying and unconvincing”; see The Forked Flame:A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) 174. 10. Indeed, it is difficult to say whether religious terms came to be used scientifically or scientific terms adopted religious meanings.The concepts of force, polarity, and equilibrium were known to the ancient Greeks, like Heraclitus and Plato, whose philosophical systems were often simultaneously scientific and religious. Neo-Platonism had an important impact on the development

Notes

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

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of Kabbalah; see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). It was generally known in nineteenth-century Europe that modern science was an outgrowth of alchemy. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, e.g.,Viktor Frankenstein learns from his professors about the historical connections between the medieval alchemists and the chemists of his day. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York: De Witt Revolving Fund, 1958 [1862]) 258, 275, 497. Lawrence read this work in 1907, during his second year at Nottingham University; see Rose Marie Burwell, “A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading,” A D. H. Lawrence Handbook, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) 68. For a discussion of Spencer’s influence on Lawrence, see Daniel J. Schneider, D. H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984). Schneider has suggested that the “stream of synthetic creation” and “dark river of dissolution” mentioned in Women in Love parallel Spencer’s discussion of the “alternate eras of Evolution and Dissolution,” which are “immeasurable period[s]” dominated by “attractive forces,” and “repulsive forces,” respectively (16–17). See Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1900). Lawrence read Haeckel in 1908; see Burwell, “A Checklist” 70. For a discussion of Haeckel’s influence on Lawrence, see Schneider, The Artistas Psychologist 17–19. “The different relation of the various elements towards each other, which chemistry calls ‘affinity,’ is one of the most important properties of ponderable matter. . . . Each shade of inclination, from complete indifference to the fiercest passion, is exemplified in the chemical relation of the various elements towards each other, just as we find in the psychology of man, and especially in the life of the sexes. . . . The fundamental unity of affinity in the whole of nature, from the simplest chemical process to the most complicated love story, was recognized by the great Greek scientist, Empedocles . . . in his theory of ‘the love and hatred of the elements’ ” (Haeckel 224–5). James C. Cowan discusses other scientists, like Charles Richet and Walter Cannon, whose ideas of equilibrium or homeostasis parallel Lawrence’s; see D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) 17–24. See Fiona Beckett’s insightful analyses of Lawrence’s psychology books in D. H. Lawrence:The Thinker as Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). Interestingly, like the Indo-European roots of “analysis,” “discernment,” “criticism,” and “discrimination,” the root of “science” (skei) signifies cutting and separating. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious/Fantasia of the Unconscious 54. “When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death established.Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces and sun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outer universe, the Cosmos.The cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the dead bodies and dead energies of by-gone individuals.The dead bodies decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat, and radiant energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts” (Fantasia 182). Beckett distinguishes between the “negative friction” of Gerald and Gudrun and the “positive friction” of Birkin and Ursula (156). See Thomas H. Miles, “Birkin’s Electro-Mystical Body of Reality: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Kundalini,” D. H. Lawrence Review 9 (1976) 194–212; and Gerald Doherty,“The Darkest Source: D. H. Lawrence,Tantric Yoga, and Women in Love,” Essays in Literature 11:2 (1984) 211–22. In “The Darkest Source,” Doherty demonstrates that Lawrence learned about yoga and the chakras not only from the Theosophists but also from reading Richard Pryse’s The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910) in 1915–16 and one or more of Sir John Woodroffe’s translations of and commentaries on Tantrism, which is the version of yoga that concentrates on the art of sacred sexuality.Woodroffe’s four major works are Tantra of the Great Liberation, Principles of Tantra, Shakti and Shakta, and The Serpent Power. According to Doherty, Woodroffe’s major works “created a

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23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

Notes

sensation among English enthusiasts between the years 1913 and 1920,” and Lawrence probably would have been familiar with one or more of them (213). Lawrence’s letters and essays written between 1917 and 1921 show a “growing preoccupation” with the chakras (212). In an August 24, 1917 letter to David Eder, Lawrence inquires “Have you read Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine? . . . Do you know the physical—physiological—interpretations of the esoteric doctrine?—the chakras and dualism in experience. . . . Did you get Pryce’s [sic] Apocalypse Unsealed?”; see Letter 1442, Letters, vol. 3, 150. The seven chakras are located in the (1) sacrum, (2) genitals, (3) navel, (4) heart, (5) throat, (6) brow, and (7) crown of the head. Certainly, the suppression of The Rainbow in November 1915 would have contributed to Lawrence’s decision to use indirection when portraying or suggesting sadomasochistic sex. For a discussion of his response to the suppression, see Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence:Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 275–82. Scott Sanders has suggested that the emphasize on beetles, corruption, and buttocks is a veiled reference to sodomy, which, for Lawrence, is sex that has lost its creative power (123–32).Again, the 1915 suppression of The Rainbow would have made Lawrence extremely cautious about representing homosexual contact. The passages implying lesbian contact between Ursula and Winifred Inger were particularly offensive to the censors. William Blake had associated Newtonian mechanics with the ever-rotating wheel or gear. In “There Is No Natural Religion,” he complains that from a mechanical, rationalist perspective, “The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.” For a discussion of Lawrence’s relation to Blake, see Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (London: Athlone Press, 1985) 9–20. The Indo-European root mater gives rise to “mother,” “matter,” and “material.” The feminine principle is associated with the materiality of the earth and the body. Virginia Hyde discusses the ways in which the colliery is characterized as a perverse church in The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) 102, 108. We saw the reduction of the many to the one perfect machine in Anton Skrebensky’s mechanistic view of society in The Rainbow. Maria Di Battista says that for Lawrence, as for Kirkegaard, irony is “a mastered moment,”“the last rites of the living-dead” and “the last betrayal of the creative Source”; see “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Judgment Book,’ ” D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988) 153. Blavatsky describes “ether” as “the grossest form” of “A’Kasa,” which “in its higher aspect . . . is the Soul of the World” (Secret Doctrine, I, 13). Lawrence’s “red ether” is thus a degraded form of a numinous substance (“obscene beyond”). Eliphas Levi calls Ether “The Universal Agent”; see Transcendental Magic, trans.A. E.Waite (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1972 [1896]) 55. See Reflections on the Death 287 and 9–10. In Movements in European History, Lawrence positively describes the Roman citizen as proud and free:“To be a Roman citizen, in the days of the real greatness of Rome, was to be a proud free man, subject to no master, a fearless supporter of the laws of freedom” (11). This description recalls Birkin’s discussion of the singular, proud, courageous man and woman who freely enter into a star equilibrium. Letter 1263 in Letters, vol. 2, 636. “[I]n the late republican period a vaulted [fornix] underground dwelling in Rome [is] where poor people and prostitutes lived; hence (especially in early Christian writings) [fornix signifies] a brothel”; see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris (Boston:American Heritage Publishing, 1975) 517. In her discussion of Women in Love, Stefania Michelucci says that “the house decisively signifies a place of conflict, absence of communication, and mutual violence” (77). In The Rainbow,

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42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

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regressive, centripetal movement is associated with the nostalgic “tendency to absorb external space into the home” (75). Ben Ephraim and Whelan offer a Jungian interpretation of the scene: it represents a regressive fixation of the libido on the mother imago. See Gavriel Ben Ephraim,“The Teller Reasserted: Exercisings of the Will in ‘Women in Love,’ ” D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988) 94; and Whelan, Myth and Metaphysic 81. In Kabbalah, evil is the “sitra achra,” the “other side” of God. Significantly, the name that Yeats took in the Kabbalistically oriented Golden Dawn society is “Demon Est Deus Inversus”—“a demon is an inverted god”; see Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 99. The association of a jewel or crystal with Gerald’s brain and Hermione’s hyperintellectuality may be related to the image of “the diamond mind” in Buddhism. More generally, we often speak of the mind as having “crystal clarity” or “gemlike brilliance.” Gavriel Ben Ephraim argues that in the snow-basin, Gerald “literally recapitulates what he has long been undergoing metaphorically: union-in-frigidity, self-reduction in an enclosure that rejects and freezes him” (100). I would add that in death Gerald will join his mother, who was turned into a “snow-flower” by his father (210). See George J. Zytaruk, “Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Failed Utopia,” The Spirit of D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988) 266–94. Baruch Hoffman argues that “the modalities of aggression in the positive couple [Birkin and Ursula] are channeled into ideology . . .—especially into Birkin’s Sunday-school preacher’s rant and cant—and into obscure ‘rivers of darkness’ into which Ursula and Birkin drift”; see “On the Shape the Self Takes,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988) 112. Lawrence mentions Pryse in an August 24, 1977 letter to David Eder; see Letter 1442, Letters, vol. 3, 150. Doherty has examined this pattern in Oriental Lawrence 97–109. Schapiro argues that Lawrence’s view of relationship is similar to contemporary psychoanalytic theories of relationship and intersubjectivity that emphasize the balance of self-assertion and mutual recognition (7). In The Universe Story (66–79), cosmologists Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry suggest that differentiation, autopoesis, and communion are the three cosmogenetic principles.This means that all beings, even atomic and subatomic particles, are engaged in balancing self-making activities (like growth and self-preservation) with affiliative activities (forming bonds with others). For example, atoms strive to maintain their identity as atoms (according to the Pauli exclusion theory) and yet also are inclined to cohere with other atoms to form molecules (52). Hindus and Buddhists characterize Nirvana as a desireless, willless state of freedom, bliss and peace. The etymology of “nirvana” is “extinction”: “extinction of ignorance and craving and awakening to inner Peace and Freedom”; see Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 373. As we noted above, Lawrence associates magic with the unrecoverable past: “Magic . . . is all part of the past, and part of a past self in us: and it is no good going back, even to the wonderful things”; see Letter 1435,“To Waldo Frank,” July 27, 1917, Letters, vol. 3, 143. Birkin associates the star with the individual spirit when he says, “We are all different and unequal in the spirit. . . . In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity” (103). It might appear that this scene is a veiled depiction of anal sex. I believe that it is not. Rather, I agree with Doherty that the scene represents one phase of a Tantric sexual rite which does not involve anal sex. The emphasis is on the stimulation that Ursula’s hands produce and on the energy that flows from Birkin’s lower body into her. Barry Scherr argues that Birkin’s Egyptian and Greek intelligences embody the powers of the black and white horses in Plato’s Phaedrus (70).

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53. In Theorizing Lawrence, Doherty claims that the Sherwood Forest scenes between Birkin and Ursula are too “esoteric” to qualify for “transmission as a personal message” (23).

Chapter Five The Implosion of the Transformative Pattern in The Plumed Serpent 1. One of Lawrence’s biographers, David Ellis, says that “No work Lawrence ever wrote divides his admirers as sharply as The Plumed Serpent” (219); see D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The current critical response to the novel is still quite divided. However, an interesting trend has recently emerged: a number of critics with feminist and postcolonial approaches have attempted to show that Lawrence included elements in the novel that undermine some of its overt masculinist and racist messages. See Rebecca Carpenter, “ ‘Bottom-Dog Insolence’ and ‘The Harem Mentality’: Race and Gender in The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1–3 (1993 and 1994) 119–29; Virginia Hyde, “Mexican Cypresses: Multiculturalism in Lawrence’s ‘Novel of America,’ ” in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) 195–215; Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, “Picking Up ‘LifeThreads’ in Lawrence’s Mexico: Dialogism and Multiculturalism in The Plumed Serpent,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson (New York:The Modern Language Association of America, 2001) 172–82;Virginia Hyde and L. D. Clark, “The Sense of an Ending in The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1–3 (1993 and 1994) 140–8;Theresa Mae Thompson,“Unlearning Europe: Postcolonial Questions for Teaching The Plumed Serpent,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001) 221–5; Kimberley VanHoosier-Carey,“Struggling with the Master:The Position of Kate and the Reader in Lawrence’s ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and The Plumed Serpent,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of D. H. Lawrence, ed. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001) 104–18. Lawrence’s biographer David Ellis has emphasized the “[f]irmly anti-colonial” attitude in the novel (129). Moreover, Marianna Torgovnick is willing to “modify the anger in [Kate] Millett’s critique to a new understanding of, and even sympathy with Lawrence”; see Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 167. 2. Letter 4336, “To Witter Bynner,” March 13, 1928, Letters, vol. 6, 321. Earlier that month, Lawrence wrote to Rolf Gardiner, who wanted to establish an international youth movement based on Lawrence’s vitalistic ideas, that “Yes, one can ignore Fascism in Italy for a time. But after a while, the sense of false power forced against life is very depressing. And one can’t escape—except by the trick of abstraction, which is no good”; see Letter 4322, “To Rolf Gardiner,” March 4, 1928, Letters, vol. 6, 308.What Lawrence says of fascism could almost be said of Cipriano’s militarism even though Cipriano explicitly attacks fascism in an earlier version of the novel:“Fascism won’t hold against the lust for anarchy which is at the bottom of the Fascisti themselves. The Fascisti only live because they think they can bully society. It is a great bully movement, just as communism is a bully movement. But communism is a more vital feeling”; see Louis L. Martz, ed., Quetzalcoatl: The Early Version of the Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1995) 248. For a discussion of Lawrence’s relationship with Gardiner, see Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence (Albuquerque: University New Mexico Press, 1980) 205–7. 3. While composing The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence writes to Thomas Seltzer on June 15, 1923 that the novel “interests me, means more to me than any other novel of mine”; see Letter 2843, Letters, vol. 4, 457.

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4. L. D. Clark is one of the early few critics to insist that “The characters are not recognizably insincere”; see Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence’s “The Plumed Serpent” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964) 76. In contrast, Eliseo Vivas calls the characters “mere dummies”; see D. H. Lawrence:The Failure and Triumph of Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960) 67. James Cowan argues that “character is subordinated to symbolic structure” and that “values are presented principally through the counters of image, incident and ritual”; see D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey (Cleveland and London: Press of Case Western University, 1970) 101. While William York Tindall observes that the “characters are less important than pattern,” he does not find this subordination of character displeasing because the characters are “[not] people but functions . . . [since they] exist like figures in the carpet only by relationship with the other parts of the great design”; see Introduction, The Plumed Serpent (New York: Vintage, 1959) viii–ix. In a similar vein, Louis Martz argues that “From the standpoint of a reader who expects a traditional novel, The Plumed Serpent has grave flaws. . . . [However,] Read as a novel of prophecy, with all the abrupt shifts of tone and technique that prophecy manifest, The Plumed Serpent may be judged a success, within its own mode of existence”; see “Introduction” in Queztacoatl xxxi. I will show that Kate’s relationships are too static and pedantic—and too subordinated to the aims of Ramon and Cipriano and their Quetzalcoatl religion—to be vivifying for the reader. I agree in part with Paul Poplawski who argues that “Lawrence’s attempt to integrate Kate’s personal quest with the development of the Quetzalcoatl religion backfires somewhat, in that because [sic] he fails to convince us—and he sure does—that Don Ramon’s organization is truly a creative force, he also inevitably compromises and undermines the credibility of Kate’s apparent achievement of creative equilibrium toward the end of the novel”; see Promptings of Desire: Creativity and the Religious Impulse in the Works of D. H. Lawrence (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1993) 39. I would say that the movement’s creativity is hindered because it relies largely on a single man’s creative efforts (Ramon’s) and because that man’s creativity is driven as much by a premeditated ideology as by spontaneous creative impulse. 5. Judith Ruderman argues that the novel champions “the patriarchal principle”; see D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984) 149. For another influential analysis of Lawrence’s patriarchal politics, see Cornelia Nixon, Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn against Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). Rebecca Carpenter,Virginia Hyde, and Kimberley VanHoosier-Carey have recently shown that the novel contains elements that partially undermine patriarchal politics; see note 1 earlier. I would agree with these critics that Kate’s participatory and critical presence in the movement does modify its patriarchal thrust, and I would agree with Hyde that Lawrence is a pioneer in partially undoing patriarchal and misogynist elements in traditional Aztec mythology, but I argue that these elements nevertheless dominate the novel and inhibit its transformational impact on the modern reader. 6. Scott Sanders argues that Lawrence was aware, from his reading of anthropology and study of Indian culture, that “collective ritual arises out of and sustains communal life, but does not produce it”; see D. H. Lawrence: The World of The Major Novels (London:Vision, 1973) 147–8. Louis Martz argues that “throughout Quetzalcoatl, the mythological element is closely related to the native scene, with all its local detail,” whereas in The Plumed Serpent, “[t]he Hymns . . . no longer create the effect [as they did in Quetzalcoatl] of arising uncertainly and gradually from native life, accompanied by native instruments”; instead, there is “much greater stress upon the transcendent element” (xxx, xvi, xxviii); see “Introduction,” in Quetzalcoatl. 7. In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence advises the reader to “Know that you are responsible to the gods inside you and to the men in whom the gods are manifest. Recognize your superiors and your inferiors, according to the gods.This is the root of all order” (27). He imagines the day when “a great soul . . . will be worshiped in the road” (186). See also “Aristocracy” (1925), where he discusses the “difference in being” among individuals; this is a difference “in degree as well as in kind” (Reflections on the Death 367). He prophesies that “in the

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

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coming era” there “will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality” which “will rule the world” (484). In Quetzalcoatl, the narrator reports Ramon as thinking that “Only the genius and the purely great man can know the new dictates of the soul.The rest of the people are helpless. They hear only the old dictates, they act only according to old habits” (113). Some critics have argued that despite Lawrence’s attraction to “natural hierarchies,” his sustained allegiance to the working class as well as his enduring critique of Western logocentrism, rationalism, ethnocentrism, and imperialism, serve to unsettle existing power structures. See note 1. See also Sandra M. Gilbert, “Preface to the Second Edition: Some Notes Toward a Vindication of the Rites of D. H. Lawrence,” in Acts of Attention:The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) ix–xxi. See note 2. See Maddox, The Story of a Marriage 369 and Ellis, Dying Game 234–40. The collection of letters that Lawrence wrote to his friend S. S. Koteliansky, a Russian-born translator, contains a record of his 12-year preoccupation (1914–26) with establishing Rananim; see The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, 1914–1930, ed. George J. Zytaruk (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970. For a discussion of Lawrence’s utopian desires, see George J. Zytaruk,“Rananim: D. H. Lawrence’s Failed Utopia,” in The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies, ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988) 266–94. The term “Rananim” is derived from the first verse of Psalm 33, which Lawrence transcribes as “Ranane Sadihkim . . . Badanoi”; see Letter 2418 to Koteliansky, dated January 14, 1922, in Letters, vol. 4, 165.The phrase means “rejoice, righteous ones, in the Lord.” Lawrence learned the Hebrew from Koteliansky, who used to sing the musical version of the phrase. Letter 832 in Letters, vol. 2, 252. Letter 841 to William Hopkin, dated January 18, 1915, in Letters, vol. 2, 259. See Zytaruk,“Rananim: Lawrence’s Failed Utopia” 273, 277, 289, 292. Letter 850 in Letters, vol. 2, 266. Letter 961,“To Bertrand Russell,” July 26, 1915, Letters, vol. 2, 371. Brenda Maddox, D. H. Lawrence:The Story of a Marriage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) 215. See also Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence:Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 241–8, 305–7. Letter 3582, Letters, vol. 5, 367. Karen Armstrong says that Basil, the fourth-century Bishop of Caesarea, made the distinction between “dogma” and “kerygma”:“ ‘Kerygma’ was the public teaching of the Church, based on scriptures. ‘Dogma’. . . represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbolic form” (402). The fifthcentury mystic Denys the Aeropagite also stressed that dogma “effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything” (114). See A History of God:The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Ballantine, 1993). Ibid. 402. In Acts of Attention, Sandra Gilbert argues that “the hymns of The Plumed Serpent are in many ways the most obviously formed, premeditated and ‘objective’ verses Lawrence had written since ‘Rhyming Poems.’ Because he was not uttering these verses in his own person but speaking as Don Ramon—or Quetzalcoatl or Huitzilopochtli—the poet was not trying to get at ‘the creative quick’ of his own life, but rather through a series of liturgical strategies, to embody the life of the universe, and to arouse a naive wonder at this life in listeners and readers. . . . Thus, more than most of Lawrence’s other verse, they come close to being what he called ‘the poetry of the beginning and the poetry of the end.’They speak with ‘the voice of the far future . . . and voice of the past’ ” (242). Gilbert classifies most of Lawrence’s poetry as “the poetry of the present.” I am arguing that the weakness of the hymns stems precisely from the fact that they do not seem to be expressions of Ramon’s or the people’s “creative quick.”

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21. Moreover, much of the power of Women in Love’s destructive phase comes from Lawrence’s discovery of the depth and range of his own rage against European civilization, his friends and himself during the “nightmare years” of the War. His frequent fits of anger toward foe and friend, as well as his horrible fights with Frieda (which were observed from 1916 onward), astonished everyone who witnessed them; see Maddox, The Story of a Marriage 225–8. 22. There are Buddhist and Hindu meditation practices in which the meditator continues to ask himself the question “Who am I?” The purpose of this practice is to disidentify with the ego and gradually identify with one’s essential being (Buddha nature or Atman). 23. More bitingly, Daleski refers to “The rape of Kate’s character which ensures that she can accept Cipriano”; see The Forked Flame:A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) 246. C. J. P. Lee presents an interesting analysis of Kate’s erotic progress in relation to the spiritual ladder of ascension discussed by St. John of the Cross; see The Metaphysics of Mass Art (107–8). 24. Scott Sanders argues that the novel is like an American romance in that it contains “a story which encounters little resistance from reality” (138). Some recent critics are more persuaded by the plausibility of Kate’s transformation; see Hyde, “Picking Up ‘Life-Threads’ ”; Virginia Hyde and L. D. Clark,“The Sense of an Ending in The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1–3 (1993 and 1994) 140–8;VanHoosier-Carey “Struggling with the Master”; and Robert E. Montgomery, The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 194–5, 205. 25. See, e.g., L. D. Clark 83–4. 26. In Quetzalcoatl. Cipriano says to Ramon, “ ‘My nature is demonish, and demonish it will remain. But you have sworn me over to the good. I will swear you fealty.Take my oath.’ ” (124). 27. It became clear to Lawrence by the end of 1916 that his sex life with Frieda was unsatisfactory; see Maddox 227–8, 239, 244. He was disappointed by their inability to have simultaneous orgasms, found himself repeatedly attracted to men, and was often so physically ill that he was uninterested or unable to have intercourse. His erotic disappointments probably account for the infrequent use of sex scenes in his “leadership” novels and for the partial idealization of erotic activity in Lady Chatterley. During the time that he was writing The Plumed Serpent, he experienced periods of sexual impotence and inadequacy; see Maddox, The Story of a Marriage 356, 367, 373. 28. Virginia Hyde shows that Lawrence attempted to recover a pre-Aztec vision and valuation of the goddess; see “Kate and the Goddess: Subtexts in The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 26.1–3 (1997) 249–74. Lawrence was familiar with the work of anthropologist Zelia Nuttall, who argued that the Aztecs had debased several ancient goddesses and reassigned the goddesses’ powers to their own male priests and gods. In contrast, Lawrence presented in The Plumed Serpent a positive, powerful goddess who is essential to the new Quetzalcoal pantheon.This portrayal of Malintzi “revers[es] not only the fate of [the earth-goddess] Toci but also that of the abandoned sister of Huitzalpochtli” (258). Lawrence’s portrayal thus represents a “rewrit[ing] of misogynistic Aztec history” (252). 29. In Quetzalcoatl, Kate is opposed to interracial marriage and presents a racist argument to support her position. She tells Cipriano:“This is too much for me. I can’t bear it. . . . This is too far. The change is too great. I can’t make it. I can’t change my race. And I can’t betray my blood. I can’t. Even if I married you, I shouldn’t really change. It would only be betraying my race, and my blood, and my own nature. No. And we could neither of us be happy. That kind of suicide’ ” (318). Apparently, between the writing of Quetzalcoatl and the completion of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence came to affirm an interracial marriage that initially repulsed him: that of Mabel Dodge, a white woman, to Tony Luhan, an Indian (see Ellis, Dying Game 216). 30. In Lady Chatterley, Lawrence rejects Connie’s self-consciously willed orgasms with Michaelis but not her spontaneous, and sometimes simultaneous, orgasms with Mellors. 31. During his stay in New Mexico, Lawrence’s attempts to dominate Frieda, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other women were particularly fierce; see Maddox, The Story of a Marraige, 310–80.

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32. See P. T. Whelan, D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988). 33. For a detailed analysis of the alchemical symbolism, see James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) 178–211. In alchemy, black is usually associated with the original condition of a substance, white with the washing of that substance, yellow with a transitional stage of transformation, and red with the substance’s complete transformation. Cowan says that these colors also symbolize earth, water, air, and fire. Michael Ballin argues that Lawrence’s reading of Lewis Spence, who observed equivalences between Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, and Hermes, importantly influenced Lawrence’s choice of alchemical (hermetic) symbolism; see “Lewis Spence and the Myth of Quetzalcoatl in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent,” D. H. Lawrence Review 13.1 (Spring 1980) 63–78. 34. Ramon’s intellectual discourses are even more extended in Queztalcoatl. For example, nearly half of Chapter XVIII is an elaborate discourse on “the mysteries.” By contrast, The Plumed Serpent represents Lawrence’s commendable attempt to trim these discourses and to dramatize, rather than merely expound, his religious ideas. 35. See Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993) 36–7, 44. 36. See Daleski 225–6; and John B. Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D. H. Lawrence’s Later Novels (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990). 37. Critics are nearly unanimous in their unwillingness to accept the novel’s justification of the public executions. 38. The phrase “men that are more than men” is an eerie echo of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.At the end of the novel, Frankenstein madly (angrily and insanely) lectures to the imperilled crew of Walton’s ship about the need to prove their heroism. He admonishes them to “Be men, or be more than men” and to continue their voyage of discovery under conditions that will surely lead to their death.Walton, the compassionate ship’s captain, finally decides that his crew’s well-being is more important than his own desire for heroism and fame, which has been inflamed by Frankenstein’s speech. The echo between the texts suggests that Cipriano may have a mad Frankensteinian lust for power and fame. 39. Mabel Dodge Luhan confirms that the dances are of New Mexican origin; see Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Knopf, 1932) 252. Like many other critics, I find the description of the dances in “The Dance of the Sprouting Corn” and “The Hopi Snake Dance” to be more powerful than those in The Plumed Serpent; see Mornings in Mexico 125–38, 141–79. Lawrence treats these dances at much greater length, and though he imposes his own symbolism on them, the imposition is not as insistent or pervasive. 40. William York Tindall uses the phrase “theocratic fascis[m]” to describe the novel’s politics; see D. H. Lawrence and His Cow Susan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) 179. 41. In “Picking Up ‘Life-Threads,’ ” Virginia Hyde argues that “Lawrence was unusual in his time in seeing the core and clue of Mexico not in its Europeanized elite in both church and society but in its vast Indian population” (173). In “Mexican Cypresses,” Hyde explains that “In Lawrence’s time, the vast Indian population of Mexico was strangely invisible to many visitors, who remarked, instead, upon the country’s elite Europeanized church and secular culture. But Lawrence, looking for that which was left out of this picture, wanted to find the indigenous foundation” (211). 42. See Ellis, Dying Game 107. 43. Kate likens the emotional nature of Mexicans to “the old, black, volcanic lava bursting up in violence, followed by a lava-rock indifference,” and she thinks that Mexico has a “volcanic violence under the earth” (416, 317). 44. Interestingly, on May 13, 1928, Lawrence tells William Roberts that “You don’t know how many Americans say that the hymns in Plumed Serpent are the finest things I ever did”; Letter 4427, Letters, vol. 6, 400. Graham Hough finds the hymns “formally abominable; the prose virtues of intelligence are in abeyance, and the loose rhythm is never strong enough to turn

Notes

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46. 47.

48.

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them into poetry.The imagery is false”; see The Dark Sun:A Study of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Macmillan, 1957) 137. Scott Sanders considers the ritual language to be a “contrived and fragmentary alternative” to the “coherence and eloquence of the Biblical tradition” it evokes in its style (144). Frederick Ramey is one of the only critics to find the hymns “magical and rhythmic” as well as “euphonious moments of worship”; see “Words in Service of Silence: Preverbal Language in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent,” Modern Fiction Studies 27.4 (Winter 1981–82) 615. Tony Pinkney argues that the hymns call for “an older collective practice of reading,” which is a “numinous enterprise,” see D. H. Lawrence’s Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990) 149–50. While I agree with Pinkney’s premise, I believe that Lawrence has not created hymns that would induce numinous readings. For a discussion of Lawrence’s use of translations of Aztec and Navajo hymns, see Gilbert, Acts of Attention, 233–42. We saw that when Lawrence comes to write Lady Chatterley, he is aware of the problem of overly scripting sacred experiences; the narrator’s attack on Connie and Hilda’s textualization of sex can be considered an indirect repudiation of the scripting process in The Plumed Serpent. Connie and Mellors spontaneously develop their own private rituals and are not locked into a rigid, collective transformational structure. More generally, Graham Hough argues that Lawrence “falls into just the sort of conscious systematizing that he condemns” (138). Michael Bell asserts that the novel’s “highly selfconscious and explicit” narrative language is in conflict with its doctrinal assertion of “the importance of the pre-conscious”; that is, the novel’s “conscious primitivism is by definition incompatible with the mode of being it is seeking to recover”; see D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 168, 178.

Conclusion 1. See Brenda Maddox, D. H. Lawrence:The Story of a Marriage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) 460. 2. Many who knew Lawrence during the five years after his collapse in Mexico said that he had softened: he was more gentle and tolerant and less rageful, attacking, and sarcastic; see Maddox, The Story of a Marriage 374, 387, 417. 3. This codification of terms and symbols is also seen in Blake’s late prophesies and to some extent in Yeats’s later poetry. Like Blake, Lawrence was aware of both the need for and danger of inventing a symbolic system. 4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover 37. 5. “The Reality of Peace” (1917) in Reflections on the Death 27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by D. H. Lawrence Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Ed.Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. London: Penguin, 1977. ———. D. H. Lawrence and Italy:Twilight in Italy; Sea and Sardinia; Etruscan Places. 1916, 1921, 1932. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. The First “Women in Love.” Ed. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 3. Ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 4. Ed. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton, and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 5. Ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 6. Ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 7. Ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. Mornings in Mexico. New York: Knopf, 1927. ———. Movements in European History. 1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. 1936. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York:Viking, 1964.

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———. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. 1968. New York: Viking, 1981. ———. The Plumed Serpent. Ed. L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious/Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York: Viking, 1960. ———. Quetzalcoatl:The Early Version of “The Plumed Serpent.” Ed. Louis L. Martz. Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan, 1995. ———. The Rainbow. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 (reproduces the 1989 Cambridge University Press edition). ———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. Sons and Lovers. Ed. Helen and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. St. Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. ———. The Trespasser. Ed. Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. The White Peacock. Ed.Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. Women in Love. 1920. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Criticism and Biography of D. H. Lawrence Adamowski,T. H.“The Natural Flowering of Life:The Ego, Sex, and Existentialism.” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”: A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. 36–57. Aldington, Richard. Portrait of a Genius, But . . . : The Life of D. H. Lawrence, 1885–1930. Melbourne and London: Heinemann, 1950. Balbert, Peter H. “The Loving of Lady Chatterley: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination.” D. H. Lawrence:The Man Who Lived. Ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry T. Moore. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. 143–58. Ballin, Michael. “Lewis Spence and the Myth of Quetzalcoatl in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.” D. H. Lawrence Review 13.1 (Spring 1980): 63–78. Becket, Fiona. D. H. Lawrence:The Thinker as Poet. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ben Ephraim, Gavriel. “The Achievement of Balance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”:A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. 136–53. ———.“The Teller Reasserted: Exercisings of the Will in Women in Love.” D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love.” Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. 79–100. Black, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Blanchard, Lydia. “Lawrence, Foucault, and the Language of Sexuality.” D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”: A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. 17–35. Bonds, Diane S. Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence.Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978.

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INDEX

abhorrent mysteries, 99, 162 absolute, 40, 55, 72, 160, 175 absorption, 74, 90, 93, 103, 146–7 abstraction, 19–20, 28, 48–9, 102, 148, 158, 164, 172, 174 Adam Kadmon, see Adam symbolism Adam symbolism, 44, 55–60, 64, 67–8, 115, 169, 174 Africa symbolism, 24, 92–5, 100; see also Egypt symbolism alchemy, 142, 184 alliteration, 42; see also phonic resonance alterity, 5, 16; see also feminism; racism; stereotype anachronism, 22, 37 anal intercourse, 48–9, 172, 178, 179 androgyny, 54–6 angels, see cherubim; seraphim anger, 16, 180; see also destruction phase; feeling; purification animism, 2, 10, 86 annihilation, 79–84, 87; see also destruction phase; purification anthropology, 6, 7, 161, 162; see also Frazer, James; Harrison, Jane Ellen; Nuttal, Zelia antithesis, see complementarity; holism; paradox; polarity (polarization) Aphrodite, 139 Apocalypse, 40, 48, 55 Apollonian, 77, 115, 161 apotheosis, see deification

“Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” 3, 18, 167, 168 aristocracy, 83, 101, 128–30, 159, 181–2 “Aristocracy,” 181–2 ark symbolism, see Noah symbolism art, 1–4, 7, 29, 46, 50, 99, 159–60, 173, 174; see also literary technique “Art and Morality,” 160, 161, 166 artist, see art assonance, 42; see also phonic resonance atheism, see destruction phase; nihilism authoritarianism, 126–55; see also fascism awareness, see consciousness awe, 32, 119, 159; see also sacred experience; sacred feeling Ayin (Nothingness), 174–5; see also sephirot Aztec, 126–55, 183, 185 balance, see equilibrium Barthes, Roland, 167, 170 beak symbolism, 139 beetle symbolism, 94, 178 Besant,Annie, 6, 11, 53, 67, 162–3, 173; see also Theosophy Bible, 3, 56–8, 71, 170, 173, 182, 185; see also Kabbalah bird symbolism, 25, 36–7, 41, 101, 103, 143, 145, 146, 152–4, 169; see also Quetzalcoatl Blake,William, 175, 178, 185 Blavatsky, Helena, 6, 11, 53, 64, 162–3, 173, 178; see also Theosophy

196

Index

Bloomsbury circle, see Forster, E. M.; Gertler, Mark;Woolf,Virginia body, 20–30, 32–50, 53–64, 67, 70, 77–81, 87–125, 131–5, 138–9; see also consciousness: bodily born again, see rebirth symbolism Brewster,Achsah, 163 Brewster, Earl, 163, 168 Brown, Curtis, 165 Buber, Martin, 109 Bucke, Richard, 2, 160 Buddha, 7, 37, 50; see also Buddhism Buddhism, 37, 50, 111–25, 163, 168, 170, 182 bullying, see will (willfulness) Bynner,Witter, 180 Campbell, Beatrice, 129 Campbell, Gordon, 74, 129, 174 carbon self, see self (models of) caricature, 18, 181 castration anxiety, 29 censorship, 13, 172, 178 center symbolism, 73; see also centrifugal/centripetal symbolism; wheel symbolism centrifugal/centripetal symbolism, 172 ceremony, 47, 130–1, 138, 140–8, 185 chakras, 11, 55, 91–2, 167, 177, 178; see also yoga chaos, 87, 92, 99, 112 character armor, 16 character assassination, 18, 181 cherubim, 57, 68, 74, 174 child symbolism, 25–7, 105–6, 108–9, 137, 161 chora, 28, 166 Christianity, 7, 159, 163, 178; see also Jesus codification, 74, 158, 185 colonialism, 126–55 color symbolism, 142, 184 combat symbolism, 78–82, 96–8, 134–5; see also war communism, 129, 180 compassion, 17, 18, 38, 99, 115, 144

complementarity, 101; see also holism; paradox concreteness, 37, 164; see also abstraction connection, see relatedness consciousness bodily, 32–50, 58, 62–6, 115–24, 131–3, 139, 146–7 mental, 4, 7, 8, 15–30, 52, 60, 70, 76–82, 86–111 See also sacred experience; sacred feeling consonance, 42; see also phonic resonance contact, see relatedness; sacralization phase; somatic focalization contemplation, see meditation contrived narrative, 13, 31, 126–9, 135, 154 copula, 70; see also stative cosmology, see cosmos cosmos, 48, 86–7, 113–14, 158, 168, 177, 179 cosmic consciousness, see cosmos creative mystery, see creativity; mystery creativity, 1, 13, 43, 45, 53–4, 67, 74, 93, 112–13, 123, 130–1, 160, 161, 166, 181 criticism, 18, 30, 46, 50, 177; see also consciousness: mental Crosby, Harry, 99 “The Crown,” 52, 54, 93, 176 crown symbolism, 54–7, 175 curiosity, 26, 166 Dahlberg, Edward, 157 dance symbolism, 48, 79, 134, 145–8, 184 darkness symbolism, 44, 57, 71, 72, 78, 81, 83, 90, 101–4, 107–8, 111, 117–24, 131–5, 145–7, 149, 150, 152–4, 161 day/night symbolism, 25, 49, 71, 77, 114, 153; see also Apollonian; darkness symbolism; Dionysian death symbolism, 2, 15, 16, 23, 30, 46, 79–81, 86–7, 101, 104, 110–11, 144, 169, 170, 176, 177; see also destruction phase; rebirth symbolism; sacralization phase

Index de Beauvoir, Simone, 5, 16; see also feminism; patriarchy deconstruction, 9, 34, 46–50; see also Derrida, Jacques deification, 64–71, 137–9, 168, 181, 184 demon symbolism, 108, 135, 179, 183; see also evil Derrida, Jacques, 161, 165; see also deconstruction; logocentrism; ocularcentrism destruction phase, 7, 13–30, 76–82, 87–111, 161 Deus, 37; see also God; transcendence devil, see demon devolution, 51–2, 177 diamond symbolism, see jewel symbolism didacticism, 13–14, 20, 119, 126–9, 130–1, 151, 171 Dionysian, 77, 114 discourses, see Kabbalistic discourses; mechanistic discourses; organic discourses; yogic discourses discovery symbolism, see exploration symbolism disintegration phase, see destruction phase dissection, 18; see also consciousness: mental; criticism dissolution, see destruction phase; reductionism distancing, 17–18, 22, 24; see also destruction phase divinity, see God; Goddess; Godhead; immanence; transcendence dogma, 130, 182 dog symbolism, 35, 144–5, 148 domination, see authoritarianism; fascism; patriarchy; sadomasochism door symbolism, 65, 68, 175 double rhythm, 6, 17, 29; see also destruction phase; oscillation; sacralization phase dream symbolism, 39, 92, 144 drum symbolism, 145–6

197

dualism, 18, 61, 105; 165, 178; see also consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity ecstasy, 37, 89, 100, 104, 105, 112, 114, 139, 149; see also Dionysian Eden, see Adam symbolism; Eve symbolism Eder, David, 162, 178, 179 egg symbolism, 115; see also rebirth symbolism ego, 16, 37, 54, 88–9, 161; see also consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism Egypt symbolism, 121–2, 179; see also Africa symbolism Ein Sof (Infinite One), 53, 64, 72–3, 174, 175; see also Godhead Einstein,Albert, 160 electricity symbolism, 78–80, 87, 90–2, 112–13, 116–19, 139 Eliot,T. S., 165 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 162 Empedocles, 177 equilibrium, 3, 26, 40, 54–5, 67, 69, 75, 77, 85, 87, 103, 106, 113, 114, 122, 140, 143, 160, 169, 175, 176, 177, 179 eroticism, see love; sex esotericism, see Buddhism; Golden Dawn Society; Hermeticism; Kabbalah; Sufism;Theosophy;Yoga Eternal Now, 37, 65–6, 160, 174, 182 eternal recurrence, 172 ether, 99, 178 Eve symbolism, 44, 56, 58, 102, 110, 115, 169 evil, 54, 73, 179; see also husk symbolism; sin evolution, 84, 177; see also devolution eye symbolism, see ocularcentrism; specularity The Fall, 51, 56, 174; see also Adam symbolism; Eve symbolism Fantasia of the Unconscious, 55, 86, 121, 177

198

Index

fascism, 128, 180, 184; see also authoritarianism Faulkner,William, 166 feeling, 1, 2, 15–16, 23, 26–7, 33, 36, 38, 40–8, 51, 57, 65, 74, 81, 87, 107, 114, 117, 132–4, 138–9, 171; see also destruction phase; sacralization phase; sacred feeling feminism, 5, 15–16, 161, 164–5, 180, 181, 182; see also goddess; Malintzi; mother symbolism; Shekhinah fetish, 23, 90 fictitious transport, see pseudo-mysticism fire symbolism, 38, 41–2, 167, 169 fixity, 25, 79, 136–7, 143 flower symbolism, 89, 101, 111, 116 flux, see Heraclitus focalization, 169; see also point of view; somatic focalization force, see electricity symbolism; magnetism symbolism; radioactivity symbolism Forster, E. M., 129 Foucault, Michel, 165, 171, 174 fountain symbolism, 119, 132; see also water symbolism fourth dimension, 160 frame, 36, 66 Frank,Waldo, 175 Frankenstein, 177, 184 Frazer, James, 6, 85, 162 freedom, 69, 114, 178, 179; see also liberty Freud, Sigmund, 20, 23, 85, 165; see also Jung, Carl; Kristeva, Julia; Lacan, Jacques; psychoanalysis; Reich, Wilhelm friction symbolism, 90–1, 96, 139, 177 “The Future of the Novel” (also entitled “Surgery for the Novel—or the Bomb”), 2 gap, 44, 47 Garden of Eden, see Adam symbolism; Eve symbolism Gardiner, Rolf, 180

gaze, see ocularcentrism; specularity gender, 54–7, 58–61, 69, 168, 173; see also feminism; patriarchy; sex Genesis, see Adam symbolism; ark symbolism; Eve symbolism; Noah symbolism Genette, Gerard, 169 genitals, see John Thomas; Lady Jane; phallic symbolism; sadomasochism; sex; womb symbolism Gertler, Mark, 76, 129 God, 3, 53–7, 135; see also Goddess; Godhead; immanence; transcendence; Huitzilopochtli; Quetzalcoatl Goddess, 137–8, 173, 183; see also Isis; Malintzi; Shekhinah Godhead, 53, 64, 98; see also Ein Sof (Infinite One) Golden Dawn Society (Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), 53, 163; see also Mathers, S. L. MacGregor;Waite, Arthur Edward;Yeats,W.B. Greek thought, 121, 166, 179; see also Empedocles; Heraclitus; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Plato Haeckel, Ernst, 11, 85, 177 hand symbolism, 38–9, 59, 90, 102, 136, 169; see also somatic focalization Harrison, Jane Ellen, 6, 7, 162 harvest symbolism, 103 hatred, 18; see also destruction phase; feeling; misanthropy head-centered consciousness, see consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism Heraclitus, 79, 167, 168, 169, 176 Hermeticism, 163; see also Golden Dawn Society; Mathers, S. L. MacGregor; Waite,Arthur Edward Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, see Golden Dawn Society hierarchy, see aristocracy; authoritarianism; fascism

Index hierophant, 1, 2, 6; see also religious initiation rite hieros gamos, 56, 65, 137–40 Hinduism, 11, 91, 111–25, 163, 177 holiness, 65, 160; see also sacralization phase holism, 38, 40–1, 58, 95, 129, 160; see also complementarity; paradox Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit), 40, 56, 169, 173, 174, 175; see also soul Holy Temple, see temple symbolism homoeroticism, 133, 178 Hopkin, Sally, 159 horror, 136 horse symbolism, 63, 95–7, 108–9 house symbolism, 68–9, 178; see also temple symbolism Huitzilopochtli, 131–55, 183 hunt symbolism, 78–81 husk symbolism, 52, 72–3, 163, 165; see also evil hymns, 151–5, 182, 184–5 hypnosis, 72–82 I–Thou relation, 109; see also Buber, Martin ice symbolism, 95, 107–8 ideal reader, 6; see also reader response theory image-thought, 43, 169, 170; see also visualization imagistic profusion, 35–6 imago, see Lacan, Jacques immanence, 4, 37, 54–5, 57, 133, 169; see also theos; transcendence impermanence, 170; see also Buddhism impersonality, 3, 37, 58, 64, 66, 109, 136, 148, 153 implied reader, 5; see also Iser,Wolfgang; reader response theory impotence, 183 independence, see singularity Indians, 126–55 individualism, see singularity initiation, see religious initiation rite

199

inner-outer polarity, 70–2; see also paradox; polarity (polarization) instrument symbolism, 86–7, 98, 109, 136, 138 integration, see sacralization phase intellectualism, see consciousness: mental interdependence, see relatedness interracial marriage, 137–40, 183 intuition, 43, 66, 86 irony, 29–30, 178; see also satire irritation, 30; see also destruction phase; feeling; purification Iser,Wolfgang, 5, 162; see also implied reader; reader response theory Isis, 174; see also Blavatsky, Helena; Goddess James,William, 2, 29, 159, 161 Jesus, 7, 64–5, 151–4, 174; see also Christianity jewel symbolism, 109–10, 142, 179 Jewish mysticism, see Kabbalah John Thomas, 47 John Thomas and Lady Jane, 30, 47 Joyce, James, 8, 163, 166 Jung, Carl, 163, 179 Kabbalah, 8, 51–82, 91, 173–5 Kabbalistic discourses, 8, 51–82, 91, 173–5 Kingdom, see Shekhinah Kierkegaard, Soren, 178 klippot (husks, shells), see husk symbolism knowledge, see consciousness koan, 168; see also Buddhism Koteliansky, S. S., 29, 176, 182 Krenkow, Fritz, 162 Kristeva, Julia, 28, 166 Kundalini energy, see chakras;Yoga Lacan, Jacques, 5, 23, 166, 168 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 9, 13–50, 158, 164–72 Lady Jane, 47

200

Index

lava symbolism, 43, 48, 170, 184; see also volcano symbolism Lawrence, David Herbert, see topic or text of interest Lawrence, Frieda, 13, 156, 182, 183 Levi, Eliphas, 76, 163, 175 liberation, 179; see also freedom; liberty; Nirvana liberty, 69, 79, 100–1 linked figures, 19, 23–4, 35–6, 41, 62–3, 64–74, 87–8, 112–13 literary devices, see literary technique literary technique, 5–6, 13–14; see also abstraction; alliteration; assonance; codification; concreteness; consonance; copula; destruction phase; didacticism; discourses; distancing; frame; imagistic profusion; irony; linked figures; loop method; meditation; metaphor; metonym; miniaturization; negation; omission; paradox; parody; phonic resonance; pivotal words; plural pronoun; plural protagonist; religious initiation rite; repetition; rhyme; rhythm; sacralization phase; sacred discourses; sacralization phase; satire; somatic focalization; stative; subliminal links; summary; symbolism; textualization of sex; transvaluation; visualization logic, see logocentrism logocentrism, 15–21, 161; see also consciousness: mental; Derrida, Jacques loop method, 77–8, 164 love, 44–5, 54–7, 74, 112; see also sacralization phase Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 183, 184 Luhan,Tony, 183 Lukacs, George, 166 machine, see mechanistic discourses magic, 10, 52, 75–82, 85–6, 93, 103, 116, 179 magical discourses, 10, 52, 75–82, 85–6, 93, 103, 116, 179

magnetism symbolism, 80, 90 Malintzi, 135–40, 183; see also Goddess Mann,Thomas, 27 Mansfield, Katherine, 129 marriage, 3, 25, 56–7, 64–74, 137–40, 168; see also hieros gamos masculinism, see aristocracy; authoritarianism; fascism; feminism; patriarchy masochism, see sadomasochism master, see aristocracy; authoritarianism; fascism; patriarchy masturbation, 167 materialism, 172 Mathers, S. L. MacGregor, 53, 173; see also Golden Dawn Society; Hermeticism; Kabbalah matter-mother connection, 97–8, 178 McLeod,Arthur, 159, 176 mechanism, 10, 20, 70, 85–111, 166 mechanistic discourses, 10, 20, 70, 85–111, 166 Medieval (period, consciousness), 58 meditation, 37, 41, 66, 163, 168, 169, 182; see also sacralization phase mesmerism, 76–82 metal symbolism (also blade, sword), 79–80, 96, 158 metaphor, 35, 164, 165, 167, 170; see also linked figures; symbolism metaphysics, 54–5; see also “The Crown”; “The Reality of Peace”;“Study of Thomas Hardy” metonym, 35, 167; see also linked figures; symbolism Mexico, 126–55, 180–5 militarism, 126, 135–6, 144–5 Millett, Kate, 16, 161 mind, see consciousness: mental mindfulness, 163; see also Buddhism; meditation mindlessness, see unconsciousness miniaturization, 28 mirror symbolism, see specularity

Index misanthropy, 84, 176 miscegenation, see interracial marriage misogyny, see feminism; patriarchy mixing of discourses, 39, 103, 122 mob, 148–50; see also racism; stereotype mockery; see satire modern consciousness, see consciousness: mental; modernism modernism, 27, 29, 93–4, 163, 166 moon symbolism, 79–81 morality, 46, 50, 91, 99, 151, 160; see also authoritarianism; censorship; evil; fascism; relatedness; shame; violence “Morality and the Novel,” 2, 165 mortification phase, see destruction phase Moses, 71 Mother Earth, 97–8, 178 mother symbolism, 25–6, 45, 54–7, 69, 87, 101, 105–6, 178, 179; see also child symbolism; Goddess; Malintzi; Shekhinah Movements in European History, 154, 178 Murry, John Middleton, 129 mystery, 33, 44–7, 95, 117–24, 130, 133–6, 150, 163, 174, 184; see also sacred experience mysticism, see Buddhism; Kabbalah; pseudo-mysticism; sacralization phase; Sufism;Theosophy;Yoga mythology, 75, 118, 151–5; see also Bible; Ovid Narcissus, 75 narrative technique, see literary technique narrative texture, see literary technique narrative theory, see Barthes, Roland; Genette, Gerard; Iser,Wolfgang; reader response theory; somantic focalization;Todorov,Tzvetan narrators, 8–9, 14–15, 164, 167; see also destruction phase; sacralization phase Navajo, see Indians negation, 29, 30, 45, 73, 166; see also destruction phase; sacralization phase New Testament, see Christianity; Jesus

201

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 8, 27, 161, 171, 175; see also Apollonian; Dionysian night/day symbolism, see day/night symbolism nightmare symbolism, 182 nihilism, 29 Nirvana, 114, 179; see also Buddhism;Yoga Noah symbolism, 71 nonduality, see holism nostalgia, 103–4 “The Novel and the Feelings,” 2 novel’s role, 1–3; see also art Now, see Eternal Now number symbolism, 40, 44–5, 47, 143 numerology, see number symbolism numinous feeling, see feeling: sacred Nuttall, Zelia, 183 obscenity, 99; see also pornography; shame ocularcentrism, 15–16, 22–9, 75–9, 87–9, 161, 166 omission, 44, 47 organic discourses, 32–5, 57–64, 113, 166 orgasm, 21, 26–9, 37, 40–2, 89, 103–4, 138–40, 183 Orwell, George, 19 oscillation, 8, 14, 40, 43, 123, 163; see also double rhythm; snake slough otherness, see alterity Otto, Rudolf, 2, 16, 160 Ouspensky, P. D., 2, 20, 160, 166, 167 Ovid, 168 paganism, 43 panopticon, 24, 166; see also Foucault, Michel; ocularcentrism; specularity pantheism, 2, 53, 85, 173 Paradise, see Adam symbolism; Eve symbolism paradox, 35, 37, 158; see also complementarity; holism; polarity (polarization) parody, 17, 19, 22, 28, 93, 98, 110–11; see also satire partiality, 94; see also holism

202

Index

passion, 3, 6–7, 16, 19, 37, 42, 49, 57, 61, 67–8, 75, 76, 79, 100, 101, 106, 109, 115–24 passivity, 27, 49, 138–9 patriarchy, 5, 38, 126–55, 173, 181 peace symbolism, 39, 45, 47, 104–5, 114, 118, 123, 152, 169 Pearn, Nancy, 164 pendulum symbolism, 145–6; see also oscillation; rhythm perfection, 45, 69, 173; see also relatedness perspective, see point of view phallic symbolism, 42–3, 47, 96, 119, 132, 164, 168 phenomenology, 12, 158; see also reader response theory phoenix symbolism, see rebirth symbolism phonic resonance, 42; see also alliteration; assonance; consonance; repetition; rhythm; rhyme phosphorescence symbolism, 89, 100, 107 pillar symbolism, 69; see also temple symbolism pivotal words, 27–8 Plato, 166, 176, 179 play, 47, 99 The Plumed Serpent, 11–12, 126–55, 157, 180–5 plural pronoun, 20–1, 35, 43 plural protagonist, 58–61, 146–51 Poe, Edgar Allan, 136 point of view, 37–8, 41–3; see also somatic focalization polarity (polarization), 54, 105, 118, 160, 176; see also complementarity; holism; paradox pornography, 32–3, 90, 167; see also censorship positional symbolism, 142–3, 153–4 positivism, 20, 22; see also mechanistic discourses; science postcolonial, 180 power, 54–7, 61–2; see also destruction phase; force; strength prayer, 131–4

predator-prey symbolism, see hunt symbolism Presence, see Shekhinah present moment, see Eternal Now priest, 2, 159; see also hierophant; prophet; religious initiation rite Primal Adam, see Adam symbolism primitivism, see Africa symbolism; The Plumed Serpent projection, 149–50, 165 propaganda, 130 prophet, 2, 181; see also hierophant; priest; religious initiation rite prostitution, 102 Proust, Marcel, 166 Pryse, Richard, 11, 112–13, 177, 179 pseudo-mysticism, 88, 93, 97, 103, 105, 110, 136 psychoanalysis, 179; see also Fantasia of the Unconscious; Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl; Kristeva, Julia; Lacan, Jacques; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious; Reich,Wilhelm Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 55, 86, 91, 121 purgation, see purification purification, 7, 16, 30, 45, 48; see also destruction phase Quetzalcoatl, 11–12, 131–55, 181–3 Quetzalcoatl, 181, 182, 183, 184 Rabbinic period, 175 racism, 147–51, 180, 183, 184; see also stereotype radioactivity symbolism, 87, 103 The Rainbow, 1, 9–10, 51–82, 156, 172–5 rainbow symbolism, 3, 45, 57, 69; see also Holy Ghost; immanence; perfection; relatedness; soul Rananim, 111, 128–30, 182 rationality, see logocentrism reader response theory, 1, 5, 12, 158, 162; see also implied reader; Iser,Wolfgang “The Reality of Peace,” 105, 169, 185

Index rebirth symbolism (twice-born, born again), 38, 40, 44, 115, 137, 154, 161; see also sacralization phase recoil, 40, 43, 95, 107–8; see also oscillation reductionism, 95, 100, 112, 176, 178; see also destruction phase reflexivity, see consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity regression, 105–6, 172, 179; see also child symbolism Reich,Wilhelm, 16; see also character armour relatedness, 3–4, 69, 160, 168; see also perfection; sacralization phase; sacred experience; sacred feeling relationship, see relatedness religious belief, see sacralization phase; sacred experience religious experience, see sacred experience religious initiation rite, 1, 2, 6, 7, 31–50, 126–8, 156–8, 168, 174; see also destruction phase; sacralization phase Renaissance, 69–70, 174 repetition, 8, 19–20, 27–8, 41–2, 49, 95, 171; see also alliteration; assonance; consonance; loop method; phonic resonance; pivotal words repression, 16, 18, 30, 165 repulsion, 16; see also destruction phase; feeling; purification resignation, 105 retrospection, 22, 107 revelation, 160; see also Holy Ghost; perfection; relatedness; sacred experience revitalization phase, see sacralization phase rhyme, 42 rhythm, 33, 36–7, 41–4, 47, 51, 63, 95, 113, 115–16, 127, 143, 145–7, 152, 166, 168; see also double rhythm; sacralization phase ridicule, 43, 171; see also satire rind symbolism, see husk symbolism

203

ritual, see ceremony; religious initiation rite Rivera, Diego, 148 Roberts,William, 184 Roman (thought, culture), 101, 176, 178 Rosicrucians, see Golden Dawn Society; Levi, Eliphas; Mathers, S. L. Macgregor rupture, see consciousness: mental; Derrida, Jacques; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity Russell, Bertrand, 76, 129, 182 Sabbath, 170–1 sacralization phase, 6–12, 30, 31–50, 51–75, 111–25, 126–55, 156–8, 161 sacred discourses, see Kabbalistic discourses; organic discourses;Yogic discourses sacred experience, 3; see also immanence; relatedness; sacralization phase; sacred feeling; transcendence sacred feeling, 1, 2, 3, 32, 42, 44, 159; see also feeling; sacred experience sadomasochism, 77–82, 92–111, 176, 178 St. John of the Cross, 183 salt symbolism, 79–80 sanctimony, 46 satire, 17–19, 43, 46; see also consciousness: mental; criticism; destruction phase; irony; parody; ridicule schema, 13, 185 science, 19–22, 70, 76, 85–111, 166 scientific discourse, see mechanistic discourses scopophilia, 24; see also ocularcentrism; specularity Secker, Martin, 176 seed symbolism, 72–3, 136, 175; see also husk symbolism self (models of), 169, 172, 175; see also consciousness self consciousness, see consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity

204

Index

self reflexivity, see consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity Seltzer,Thomas, 180 sensuous versus sensual, 89 sephirot (divine creative powers), 53–7, 174; see also Kabbalah seraphim, 74 serpent symbolism, 61, 117, 153, 175; see also Quetzalcoatl seven levels of awareness (field or spheres of consciousness), 167; see also consciousness sex, 3, 19–30, 31–50, 58, 64, 68, 87–8, 92–111, 138–40, 167 sexism, see feminism; patriarchy shame, 13, 49, 124, 171 Shekhinah (feminine divine Presence), 54–7, 67–9, 74, 173–5; see also Goddess; Kabbalah Shelley, Mary, 177; see also Frankenstein shell symbolism, see husk symbolism sight, see consciousness: mental; destruction phase; ocularcentrism; specularity silence symbolism, 15, 24, 74, 76, 121–4, 135, 147–9 simulacrum, see ocularcentrism; specularity sin, 54; see also evil singularity, 81, 178, 179 “The Sisters,” 51; see also The Rainbow; Women in Love Sitra Achara (Other Side), see evil sleep symbolism, 39, 77, 111, 169 snake slough, 9 snake symbolism, see serpent symbolism snow symbolism, see ice symbolism socialism, 148 sodomy, see anal intercourse somatic awareness, see consciousness, body; somatic focalization somatic focalization, 33–4, 37–47, 169; see also sacralization phase

Son of God, 7, 67, 113, 116–20, 173; see also Jesus; religious initiation rite soul, 2, 18, 21, 37, 41, 56, 61, 64–5, 74, 75, 77–80, 94–5, 98, 103, 110–11, 115, 124, 127, 129, 131–2, 138, 159, 170, 173, 178, 181, 182; see also Holy Ghost spatial symbolism, 164 specularity, 22–5, 97, 166; see also consciousness: mental; ocularcentrism speculation, see specularity; time consciousness Spencer, Herbert, 11, 85, 177 spirit, 4, 7, 8, 40, 43, 45, 61, 64–5, 69, 74, 127, 134, 143, 148–9, 161, 173, 175, 179 spiritual experience, see sacred experience spite, 18 split consciousness, see consciousness: mental; logocentrism; ocularcentrism; specularity spontaneity, 3, 4, 21, 28, 42, 55, 75, 92, 100, 109, 112, 116, 127, 131, 136, 138, 141, 152–3, 165, 181, 183, 185 star symbolism, 114, 122, 152, 179 stative, 26–7; see also copula Steiner, Rudolf, 163 stereotype, 147–51, 184; see also racism stillness symbolism, 3, 42–3, 73, 79, 114, 152, 170 stoicism, 29 strange conjunction, 114; see also equilibrium; perfection; relatedness; star symbolism strength, 66–7, 175; see also Nietzsche; power; sephirot Studies in Classic American Literature, 169, 171, 181 “Study of Thomas Hardy,” 46, 159, 166, 174, 175 style, see literary technique subliminal links, 35 suffering, 16, 165; see also feeling Sufism, 173

Index summary, 27, 48–9, 152 The Symbolic Meaning, 136, 171 symbolism, see Adam (Eden, Paradise); Africa; beak; beetle (scarab); bird; center; centrifugal/centripetal; child; combat; crown; dance; darkness; day/night; death; demon; dog; door; dream; drum; egg; Egypt; electricity (circuit); Eve; exploration (discovery); eye; fire; flower; fountain; friction; hand; harvest; horse; house; hunt; husk (rind, shell); ice (snow); instrument; jewel (diamond); lava; machine; magnetism; metal (blade, sword); mirror; moon; mother; nightmare; Noah (ark); number; peace; pendulum; phosphorescence; positional; radioactivity; rainbow (iridescence); rebirth; salt; seed; serpent (snake); silence; sleep; star; stillness; temple; thrills; tree; unknown; volcano; voluptuousness; vortex (whirlwind, whirlpool, spiral); water; wave; wheel (hub, rim); womb sympathy, 16–18; see also satire syncretism, 148 tactile focalization, see hand symbolism; somatic focalization Tantric Yoga, see Yoga;Yogic discourses technology, see mechanistic discourses; science temple symbolism, 68, 175 tenderness, 49, 115, 150, 171; see also love textualization of sex, 21 theater symbolism, 19, 24, 29–30 theocracy, 126–55, 184 theos, 37; see also immanence Theosophy, 6–8, 51, 67, 162, 163, 167; see also Besant,Annie; Blavatsky, Helena; Pryse, Richard thrills symbolism, 19, 21, 41, 75, 101 time consciousness, 22, 74; see also Eternal Now time-space, 22; see also eternal recurrence

205

Todorov,Tzvetan, 169 touch, see hand symbolism; somatic focalization tourism, 140–1, 184 trance, 77–8 transcendence, 4, 37, 54–5; see also Deus; immanence; sacred experience transfiguration, 68; see also immanence; Jesus; religious initiation rite; sacralization phase; sacred experience transformation, see immanence; religious initiation rite; sacralization phase; sacred experience; transcendence transvaluation, 19–20, 45, 83–125; see also Nietzsche, Friedrich; sacralization phase Tree of Life, 55, 85; see also sephirot tree symbolism, 36, 55, 85, 173 trinity, 41, 64 unconsciousness, 18, 37, 41–4, 55, 86, 91, 100, 117, 121, 132–4, 165, 171 Underhill, Evelyn, 4, 7, 40, 160, 169 unknown symbolism, 43, 44, 58, 64, 65, 78, 101, 108, 123, 140 utterance, 74, 175 Van Gogh,Vincent, 160 verbosity, see logocentrism violence, see destruction phase vision, see ocularcentrism; point of view; somatic focalization; specularity; visualization visionary, see prophet visuality, see ocularcentrism; specularity visualization, 8, 43, 169; see also meditation vitalism, 4, 38, 180; see also Nietzsche, Friedrich; sacralization phase vitalization phase, see sacralization phase vivification phase, see sacralization phase volcano symbolism, 151, 170, 184; see also lava symbolism voluptuousness symbolism, 49, 89, 146

206

Index

vortex symbolism, 42, 43, 97, 133–4, 184; see also image-thought; loop method voyeurism, see ocularcentrism; specularity vulnerability, 32, 35, 42, 136–7 Waite,Arthur Edward, 53, 69, 170, 173; see also Golden Dawn Society war, 22, 52, 83–4, 87, 173, 176, 182, 183; see also combat symbolism water symbolism, 41, 43, 118, 167, 169; see also fountain symbolism; Heraclitus; wave symbolism wave symbolism, 41, 48, 62–3, 146; see also double rhythm; oscillation; rhythm; water symbolism wheel symbolism, 73, 96, 147, 175, 178; see also holism whirlwind symbolism, see vortex symbolism wholeness, see holism “Why the Novel Matters,” 3; see also novel’s role

will (willfulness), 63, 76, 79, 97–8, 128, 135–7, 169, 180 will-to-inertia, 175; see also wheel symbolism will-to-motion, 175; see also wheel symbolism wish versus will, 136; see also will (willfulness) womb symbolism, 25, 30, 33, 41–5 Women in Love, 1, 10–11, 83–125, 157, 176–80 wonder, 32, 36, 71, 76, 117 Woodroffe, John, 177–8 Woolf,Virginia, 163, 165 World War I, see war Yeats,W.B., 164, 179 Yoga, 11, 91, 111–25, 163, 177 Yogic discourses, 11, 91, 111–25, 163, 177 Zohar, 73–7; see also Kabbalah

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