D.H. Lawrence

The Utopian Vision

Eugene Goodheart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351523776
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The dominant view of D.H. Lawrence's work has long been that of F. R. Leavis, who confined Lawrence within an exclusively ethical and artistic tradition. In D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision, Eugene Goodheart widens the context in which Lawrence should be understood to include European as well as English writers - Blake, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud among others.

Goodheart shows that the characteristic impulse of Lawrence's principal discovery was the bodily or physical life that he believed man had once possessed in his pre-civilized past and must now fully recover if future civilized life is possible. Goodheart's argument fully engages the paradoxes of Lawrence's writing. He is at once the last great representative of the moral tradition of the English novel and of the English Protestant imagination and a novelist without precedent, a diabolist in the service of the dark gods. He rejects the claims of society, while simultaneously lamenting the thwarting of the societal instinct. The oppositions and paradoxes in the work are the expression of a single, not always coherent, revolutionary imagination. D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision provides a rigorous and critical analysis of the ideological character of Lawrence's novels and essays, in particular the effect of his utopianism on his views of nature, myth, and religious experience, while responding to his aesthetic achievement. Goodheart's Lawrence is a prophetic artist whose vision is at once inspiring and dangerous.

In the new introduction to the book, Goodheart reflects upon the vicissitudes of Lawrence's reputation since the sixties when the book first appeared and his relevance to the concerns of our own time.

1

The Tablet-breaker

In recent years Lawrence has been made to serve causes not of his own choosing, notably the moral tradition of the English novel. The impetus for the remaking of Lawrence was initially provided by T. S. Eliot’s attack on Lawrence in After Strange Gods, in which Eliot found the son of a Midlands coal-miner heretical and sinister, the inevitable result of a deficiency in the kind of tradition that a good education gives.¹ F. R. Leavis, coming to Lawrence’s defense, argued insistently (sometimes impressively, often extravagantly) for Lawrence’s place in “the great tradition” of the English novel.² Lawrence has been seen in relation to other worthy traditions. For instance, in one view, he is the last great writer who embodies the attack on machinery which began in England with Wordsworth and became so pervasive a theme in Victorian literature that Pater, surveying the whole of poetry, could define “all great poetry” as “a continual protest” against “the predominance of machinery.³ There are real provocations for seeing Lawrence as traditional and moral. If one reads The Rainbow for its depiction of the traditional ways of English country life, one is impressed with Lawrence’s resemblance to the George Eliot of Adam Bede. The essay “Democracy” read without reference to his other works yields a social and morally earnest Lawrence not unlike the Carlyle of “Signs of the Times.”

The unfortunate effect of underlining Lawrence’s debts to tradition is that it tends to deprive him of the special claim that he makes upon us. His achievement has analogues in the history of literature—the achievements of Rousseau, Blake, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Rilke—but these analogues do not constitute a tradition in the meaning that usually attaches to the word. Continuity with the past, the handing-down of inherited cultural attitudes—tradition in this sense does not figure in Lawrence. He is rather, in the phrase of Nietzsche, one of “the tablet-breakers”⁴ who appear at significant crises in culture and whose characteristic impulse is to divert the current of tradition into new and hitherto unknown channels.

Lawrence and the other tablet-breakers were men possessed with a prophetic vision; for them the past was interesting only for those moments that prefigured the future. There is no nostalgia for the past, no reverence for tradition in Lawrence’s meditations on the painted tombs of Tarquinia, “the turgid muscularity” of the Etruscan figures or the Hopi snake dances.⁵ Always in Lawrence there is the ulterior view of the future.

We’ve got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we’ve got to put it down in terms of belief and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in life and art.⁶

“The next future” is at the heart of Lawrence’s quarrel with the past. He conceives of history as cyclical, not progressive. Like Blake and Nietzsche, Lawrence tried to unburden himself of the past;⁷ he thought himself to be at the beginning of a new epoch. Of course, the belief in a future radically discontinuous from the past is an illusion. As Bergson remarks of the cyclical or “pendulum” theory of history:

The pendulum is endowed with memory, and is not the same when it swings back as on the outward swing, since it is then richer by all the intermediate experience. This is why the image of a spiral movement, which has sometimes been used, is perhaps more correct than that of the oscillations of a pendulum.⁸

Moreover, even a new beginning must come out of something in the human past. As Karl Jaspers has pointed out, “if the breach in the continuity of history were allowed to be established, man would destroy himself.”⁹ In Jaspers’ description of “a sincere historicity” we have a glimpse of the tablet-breaker’s creative relationship to the past.

That which is acquired as a new possession is something which transforms the present. The insincere historicity of a culture which does no more than understand is a mere will to repeat the past; but a sincere historicity is a readiness to discover the sources which feed all life and therefore the life of the present as well.¹⁰

“The sincere historicity” is then nothing more than the freedom to discover in the past the possibilities of re-creating the present.

It is characteristic for the tablet-breaker to assume at various times the roles of nihilist, mystic, diabolist, and obscurantist, for the language of traditional thought and feeling would only give the lie to his grasp of the future. His refusal to assume traditional moral attitudes is not a refusal to be moral. On the contrary, the tablet-breaker has discovered immorality in the old attitudes, and, by assuming on occasion the mask of the immoralist, he attempts to express a new morality.

Since the new morality is a dialectical outgrowth of the old, its richness and cogency depend upon the profundity with which the immoralist has grasped the reality of what he sets out to destroy. In Lawrence’s work the traditional attitudes are subjected to the most thoroughgoing scrutiny, so that rejecting the old and creating the new are experienced as necessity. Where Lawrence fails, imagination and intelligence have turned away splenetically from the necessary task of scrutinizing the old world. The result is stridency and thinness.

The view that Lawrence “was rejecting, not the claims of society, but the claims of industrial society”¹¹ mistakenly places him in a tradition that includes Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Morris. What distinguishes Lawrence’s attack on mechanical civilization from that of the Victorian essayists is his thoroughgoing vision of the character of social organization. The industrial organization of society merely exposed its generic mechanical character. When imagined against the teeming life of nature, the life of society shrinks to almost nothing. “Upon the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp, is drawn the little, pathetic pattern of man’s moral life and struggle, pathetic, almost ridiculous.”¹² None of the Victorian writers, with the possible exception of Hardy, whose work Lawrence is describing above, ever imagined a life beyond society. Their quarrel with society was a quarrel with its evils. Like the heroes of George Eliot’s novels, they wanted only the chance to serve society, to make it better. For them the best claims of self and society are identical. The opposition between Lydgate (a man who wishes to serve the best interests of society) and Middlemarch (a community unwilling to be served) is a locus classicus for the period.

Despite his vision of the generic inadequacy of society to fulfil human desires and aspirations, Lawrence—except in his bitterest moods—never made a nihilistic rejection of society. On the contrary, by refusing to perform his duty in society, he was in a sense its truest champion. What we have in Lawrence is the coincidence of two impulses: the impulse toward self-responsibility (the phrase that he assigns to the quests of his heroes in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo) and the impulse toward true human community. When society demands total commitment, it is in the very act of destroying itself; to refuse to make the commitment then is a way of saving society from itself.

The Christian love, the brotherly love, this is always sacred. I love my neighbor as myself. What then? I am enlarged, I surpass myself. I become whole in mankind [read society]. In the whole of perfect humanity I am whole. I am the microcosm, the epitome of the great microcosm… .

Then I shall hate the self that I am, powerfully and profoundly shall I hate this microcosm that I have become, this epitome of mankind. I shall hate myself with madness the more I persist in adhering to my achieved self of brotherly love.

There must be brotherly love, a wholeness of humanity. But there must also be pure, separate individuality, separate and proud as a lion or a hawk.¹³

This is one of the “secrets” of Lawrence’s performance as a social critic—a phrase inadequate to the radical nature of his criticism. He is in constant sensitive reaction against the thousand subtle ways in which society seeks to establish its precedence in human life, because society itself will be corroded by the self-hatred of its members, if the single, isolate life of man will not be given equal sway.

The basis of Lawrence’s “social criticism” is a passionate quarrel—it is also Blake’s quarrel in The Prophetic Books— with the dualism presupposed by life in society. The opposition between impulse and obligation, personal right and law— which is the preoccupation of so much of Western literature and thought—is dissolved in Lawrence’s conception of spontaneous being. For Lawrence society is not a system of obligations, a necessary social contract into which one enters unwillingly; it is the fulfilment of the human impulse toward community with others. In a letter Lawrence characterized his personal tragedy as the consequence of the thwarting of his “societal” instinct, which he felt to be deeper than the sexual instinct.¹⁴ The concern with community and citizenship in “Education of the People” reflects a fear about what happens to the spontaneous life of a person in a period of social disintegration, when connections with others become impossible.¹⁵

The appeal to spontaneity to decide the issues of life is the only recourse the tablet-breaker has to overcome the dualisms of life and culture, the self and the world. He is deaf to the claims of the world and culture, because to grant them a hearing is to tolerate the dualism. Every impulse of the tablet-breaker is devoted to restoring culture to life, the world to the self. The great task for the Utopian reconstruction of society that Lawrence undertakes is to discover and present in his work the content of “the profound spontaneous soul of men.”¹⁶

Lawrence conceives all human relationships, personal, familial, and social, in “the spontaneous mode.”

The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the interaction between the individual and the outer universe. Which means that just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the foetus, so does every man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves.¹⁷

By spontaneity Lawrence does not mean giving free rein to the impulses. He means rather a dialectic within the spontaneous mode itself between impulse and resistance.

Because there is no primary resistance in us, nothing … resists the helpless but fatal flux of ideas which streams us away. The resistant spontaneous centers have broken down in us.¹⁸

Without resistance (a spontaneous action of the will), individual being is impossible.

In the essay on education and the two books on psychoanalysis, Lawrence shows in detail how the infant is socialized through a spontaneous interaction with his parents. The child for Lawrence is “soft and vulnerable,” and it “is our responsibility to see that this unformed thing shall come to its own final form and fullness, both physical and mental.”¹⁹ Lawrence’s principal lesson is to leave the child alone, i.e., teach it to be alone.

Break the horrible circle of … lust… . Seize babies away from their mothers, with hard, fierce, terrible hands. Send the volts of fierce anger and severing force violently into the child… . Drive them back from thei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1 The Tablet-breaker
• 2 Art and Prophecy The Mythical Dimension
• 3 The Eternity of the Phenomenon
• 4 The Greater Life of the Body
• 5 The Reciprocity of Power
• 6 A Representative Destiny
• Bibliography
• Index