Naked Liberty and the World of Desire

Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H. Lawrence

Simon Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415762595
• eBook ISBN: 9781135888664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this new and original study, Simon Casey explores the long-neglected link between D. H. Lawrence and philosophical anarchism. Focusing on the writings of some of the major anarchists-with particular emphasis on Stirner, Godwin, Bakunin and Thoreau-this book argues that the conceptual parallels between Lawrence and anarchism are strong and extensive and that reading Lawrence within the context of this tradition significantly enhances any understanding of his work. Lawrence's faith in the essential decency of human nature, his forceful defense of individual liberty, and his intolerance of all forms of domination and control all reflect the essential features of anarchism. Naked Liberty and the World of Desire looks at where these attitudes find explicit articulation in Lawrence's essays, poems, and letters, and shows how they are illustrated in his major works of fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

The Radical Individualism of D.H.Lawrence and Max Stirner

I wanted a real community, not built out of abstinence or equality, but out of many fulfilled individualities seeking greater fulfilment. (2L 266)

The extent to which Lawrence believed that a “real community” could be built out of fulfilled individuals “seeking greater fulfilment” has long been a subject of discussion for critics, who generally seem to agree that Lawrence never thought the matter through to either a satisfactory or a responsible conclusion. Comments on this aspect of Lawrence’s thought have ranged from Rick Rylance’s measured observation that Lawrence “cannot reconcile his opposed ideals of social harmony and spontaneous individuality” (168), to John R.Harrison’s impatient claim that “Society becomes impossible if the moral code of each individual is to fulfill his spontaneous desires, and Lawrence should have realised it” (186).¹ Yet Lawrence’s position cannot be so easily dismissed, and Harrison’s remark in particular is loaded with unintended irony. Lawrence, it should go without saying, was clearly convinced that the society of his own time had in fact become “impossible,” and he often pointed to the carnage of the Great War to prove it. But for Lawrence the transformation of society into a nightmare was plainly the result of something quite different from individuals fulfilling their own spontaneous desires: “It is not the will of the overweening individual we have to fear to-day,” he wrote as the war raged on, “but the consenting together of a vast host of null ones” (RDP 43). Whatever Lawrence “should have realized,” his reasoning here is hard to refute: the slaughter in France and Flanders was clearly not the sustained expression of spontaneous individuality but, as with all modern wars, the orchestrated movement of a controlled population.

But what is the connection that Lawrence makes between the spontaneous desires of individuals and the creation of a “real community”? And what would be the best way to go about understanding this connection? An important first step toward answering both of these questions was taken over thirty years ago when Baruch Hochman identified Lawrence as a “radical individualist” and attempted to outline what Lawrence’s particular kind of individualism actually entails.² And yet, although Hochman does well to point out that “human community” for Lawrence “is a direct outgrowth of the body’s life and needs,” and that “there is no necessary contradiction between the impulsive, passionate life of the body and the life of the human community” (2–3), his sympathetic study of “The Radical Individualist” is nevertheless limited and, indeed, somewhat undermined by two central deficiencies. The first of these is Hochman’s belief that at some point in his writing career “Lawrence moves from a radical individualism to what I term a radical (if qualified) communalism” (xi). While Hochman’s account of this “move” is an extended one, the exact nature of Lawrence’s “changing view” nevertheless remains obscure. More important, however, is that by making a distinction between “radical individualism” and “radical communalism,” Hochman is essentially assuming, just as Rylance and Harrison do, that “fulfilled individuality” and “real community” are in fact ultimately irreconcilable goals and that Lawrence could not possibly have both. Thus for Hochman Lawrence is not really a radical individualist after all: radical individualism is only a stage that Lawrence goes through, and “moves from,” on his way to a supposedly more enlightened consideration of how people can best live together.

The second underlying deficiency of Hochman’s study, related to the first, involves his rather superficial use of the term “radical individualist.” In fact, “radical individualist” often seems to be little more than a label that Hochman hangs on Lawrence, leaving Lawrence’s individualism inadequately defined. At no point does Hochman recognize radical individualism as an intellectual tradition that exists beyond D.H.Lawrence, and he makes no attempt, as a result, to understand Lawrence within the context that this tradition provides. Questions that would lead to a more coherent and comprehensive understanding of Lawrence’s individualism therefore remain to be answered. How, for instance, are Lawrence’s ideas consistent with those of other thinkers within the radical individualist tradition? What is Lawrence’s place within the conceptual field that radical individualism represents? And perhaps most importantly, what ideas does radical individualism uphold that might help to account for Lawrence’s belief that a “real community” must be built out of “fulfilled individualities seeking greater fulfilment”?

Although little evidence exists to suggest that Lawrence had any direct knowledge of the ideas of Max Stirner, I believe that reading Lawrence and Stirner together will go far to build upon and to expand, even to correct, Hochman’s research.³ Stirner stands at the absolute centre of radical individualism, epitomizing the tradition, and his vehement, often ferocious defence of the “exclusive” and “unique” self is presented in the form of a dense but highly systematic argument, translated into English in 1907 and published under the title The Ego and Its Own. Lawrence’s equally ardent defence of the “distinct” and “unique” self (RDP 74), on the other hand, is presented in an almost flagrantly nonsystematic way, existing in a state that is more or less scattered throughout his many essays, novels, stories, poems and letters. And so from the outset critics are faced with tactical differences in the way that they have to approach these two writers: Stirner demands an intensive reading; Lawrence, more than anything else, requires an extensive one. But as I hope to make clear, what both these authors share in their defence of the individual self—a defence that is largely composed of an attack on everything that would restrict the freedom of the self—is an essential concern to create a better kind of society. The anarchist Emma Goldman observes in this regard that “Stirner’s individualism contains the greatest social possibilities” (44); Bertrand Russell notes with approval that for Lawrence “politics could not be divorced from individual psychology” (1968:20).⁴ Understanding this particularly strong connection between the individual and the social, the psychological and the political, is crucial to understanding the very nature of radical individualism, and is crucial, I argue, to understanding Lawrence.

Perhaps the best way to begin looking at the conceptual similarities that bring Lawrence and Stirner together is to look at the one element of their work that would seem at first glance to drive them apart. That is, Lawrence and Stirner appear to take directly opposite attitudes toward two particular terms that they both employ to a considerable extent: namely, the “egoist” and the “ego.” Stirner’s argument is in fact a protracted defence of the “ego,” which he sees as the source of spontaneity and selfdetermination and as the essence of what makes one “unique” (131). According to Stirner, only the purely individual human being is a fully authentic human being, and “the individual,” Stirner proclaims, “is always an egoist” (90). He enjoins his readers, therefore, to “become egoists,” and to “become each of you an almighty ego” (149).

For Lawrence, however, the “egoist” is not a self-determined and spontaneous individual but is rather “he who has no more spontaneous feelings” and who therefore “derives all his life henceforth at second hand” (P 200). The “ego” is not the locus of authenticity but of inauthenticity, or what Lawrence calls “the false I” (RDP 279): it is not a “self” but “a sort of second self” (RDP 75). Thus, far from being the natural source of an individual’s “uniqueness,” it is an intellectual construct that is more or less culturally shared: “the ego,” Lawrence writes, “is merely the sum total of what we conceive ourselves to be” (FU 227).

One easy way to understand the differences that exist between Lawrence and Stirner where the “ego” is concerned is simply to recognize that Stirner uses this term in a way that most post-Freudian readers (which includes Lawrence) will find unusual, but that he nevertheless means by it precisely what Lawrence means by the term “self” or “soul” or, in the language of his psychology books, the “primal consciousness.”⁵ There is, however, at least one instance in which Lawrence assigns a positive and distinctly Stirnerian meaning to the term “ego,” an instance which can serve as a bridge between these two writers. It appears in the famous letter to Edward Garnett, written in April 1914, in which he sets out what he was trying to accomplish in the penultimate version of The Rainbow. The passage has often been quoted by Lawrence’s critics, but the context I want to create for it requires yet another look. Thus Lawrence writes:

You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.

(2L 183; emphasis added)

More than describing his attempt to establish a special mode of characterization here, Lawrence is ultimately trying to convey something that he sees in the very structure of the self—not just the fictional but the actual self. The “stable ego” he refers to is clearly that “secondary self” which he usually identifies as the “ego,” and which he always seems to condemn. But that other, “unrecognisable,” element of the self is identified as an “ego” as well, at least in the context of this letter, and it is clearly not to be condemned, nor is it to be considered “old” or “stable” or even, it seems, knowable. And it is here, with this brief account of “another ego,” that the psychological (and ontological) interests of Lawrence and Stirner can be seen to combine. Just as Lawrence’s “other” ego is “unrecognisable,” and, elsewhere, “indescribable and unstateable” (RDP 137), so Stirner’s ego is “unutterable” (275). Lawrence’s ego is unstable in the sense that it “passes” through different “allotropic states” (though remaining “radically-unchanged”); Stirner’s ego is “transitory” (163) in the sense that it is, as I discuss in detail below, at “every moment just positing or creating” itself (135). Lawrence suggests that this other ego exists in a realm beyond “what we conceive ourselves to be”; Stirner similarly claims that “I am not an idea, but more than idea” (314), and that “no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me” (324). In short, what Stirner points to with “ego” and Lawrence points to with “another ego” is the very essence of individual being, what Lawrence calls “my integrity, my individuality, my me” (Hardy 197). To overcome the surface distraction presented by Lawrence’s customarily negative use of the term “ego,” therefore, is to understand that what both Lawrence and Stirner mean to convey, above all else, is the idea that the source of our individuality is to be found far beyond whoever or whatever it is that we think we are. Nietzsche, who can be seen as a kind of intermediary between these two writers, clearly speaks for both of them in this regard when he claims that “Your true nature lies…above that which you usually take yourself to be” (qtd. in Fernihough 1995:xxii).

The distinction that Lawrence and Stirner draw between the self and selfconcept is worth exploring further, not only because it is central to their thinking about human psychology but because it stands at the threshold of their social critique. Indeed the distinction between a “stable” and an “unrecognisable” ego, as many of Lawrence’s other pronouncements on the nature of the self begin to make clear, is really a distinction between the self as a finished and knowable product and the self as an ongoing and ungraspable process. Thus the “unrecognisable” ego is unrecognisable because it is essentially a “power” (RDP 327) and a “continuum” (P 761) rather than a spatial object or a static thing. Lawrence variously describes this self as a “flow” (e.g. P 192, 380), and a “life-energy” (RDP 310), which is why he so often conveys the sense of this self through highly specialized kinds of metaphors—through rivers, for instance, and through fountains and flames: phenomena that are found in nature and grounded in time; figures that suggest continuous motion and a perpetual expense of energy.⁶

The “stable” ego, on the other hand, is the mental bi-product of this underlying and essentially physical process. The “stable ego” is a concept of the self, necessarily connected to the “unrecognisable” ego—the “primal, spontaneous self” (RDP 73)—but “secondary” to it. Just as the “unrecognisable” ego is associated with the body, so the “stable ego” is associated with the mind. It is fixed rather than fluid, as the word “stable” suggests, and far more closely aligned with space than with time, as static objects always are. In a word, it is a bloodless reproduction of the real self, which it follows, or ought to follow, like a shadow.

Understanding what distinguishes these two egos—what distinguishes the “primal” from the “mental” consciousness, to employ Lawrence’s more customary terminology—is an important first step toward understanding the kind of psychological model that Lawrence constructs (though Lawrence himself would probably reject both “model” and “construct” as descriptive terms for what he is doing). The next step is to understand the relationship that these two forms of consciousness bear to one another. To do this, we have to dispense with at least two ideas about Lawrence which for decades have received wide (but by no means unanimous) acceptance among his critics. The first of these is that Lawrence considered the mind to be “dangerous” (Aldington 1976:xv) and that he therefore “disclaimed thought” (Carey 122). There are, of course, many instances in Lawrence’s writing where he appears to be highly suspicious of the mind, and obviously one does not want to ignore the place that this critique has within the general framework of his ideas. But it is also important to notice that Lawrence often expressed a profound sense of the mind’s importance in human affairs, claiming, as he does, for instance, in the essay “Introduction to These Paintings,” that the “real works” of scence and art are made only when “instinct, intuition, mind, intellect [are] all fused into one complete consciousness” (P 574). For Lawrence this “complete” or “whole consciousness” (P 573) is greater than mental consciousness, but only because it includes mental consciousness. And recognizing this inclusion is crucial to understanding Lawrence’s attitude toward the mind.⁷ Indeed, to take a closer look at Lawrence’s critique of the mind is to find that what Lawrence ultimately opposes is not the mind in itself, but some of the ways in which it is used. It might be helpful in this regard to turn to Lawrence’s poem “Thought,” where he makes a very careful and important distinction between two types of thought, one that he clearly approves of, and one that he clearly does not. I quote the poem in full:

Thought, I love thought.
But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience,
Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.

(Poems 673)

We should infer from this that the difference between the kind of thought that Lawrence “despises” and the kind that he “loves” is the difference between thought as a product of (largely formal) learning and thought as a process of intuition. The former kind is characterized by synthesis, the latter by insight. The one merely manipulates “already existent ideas,” which, the poem suggests, an individual will more or less passively receive from the outside world; the other is a much more engaging and creative process, the individual’s raw materials, so to speak, originating not from outside the self, but “welling up” from within it. True thought, as the final line of the poem clearly suggests, is therefore not something that an individual does, but something that an individual actually is: it is not an exercise of the mind, but an experience of “wholeness”: an experience where instinct and mind, intellect and intuition, have all become “fused into one complete consciousness.”

What Lawrence truly considered “dangerous” is not “ideas” in themselves, therefore, but “already existent” or what he more often refers to as “fixed” ideas. Understanding this distinction is crucial to understanding Lawrence’s psychological interests, furthermore, because what proceeds from it is, among other things, his conviction that the problem with the individual in the modern world is not that he (or she) has an idea of himself, but that he insists on “persisting in some fixed idea of himself” (K 263; emphasis added). Such persistence is part of what Lawrence criticizes as our habitual “insistence on the known, [on] that which lies static and external” (P 673), and its worst consequence is to bring living human beings down to the ontological level of blocks and stones:

If I say of myself: I am this, I am that!—then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to a pattern. Which is no good. (Hardy 197)

A careful look at this passage will begin to reveal how complex and paradoxical Lawrence can be when writing about the self. If I insist on what I know about myself, he suggests, I will never know who I actually am, because my “individuality” and “my me” lie elsewhere. Thus if I focus on what I know about myself—my “already existent idea” of myself—I forgo any possibility of knowing myself at all. Knowledge of the self is gained not through cognition (and therefore not through re-cognition), but through immediate experience: “We cannot analyse it,” Lawrence says of the self, “We can only know it is there” (RDP 73).

It is essential to point out, moreover, that although this passage may at first glance appear to be disclaiming the mind and ideas, it is actually championing their cause. The object of Lawrence’s attack here is not thoughts but thoughtlessness—not the mind, but mindlessness—for to “stick to” an idea, he suggests, is to become “stupid,” “Which is no good.” Lawrence’s central implication in all of this is that too much abstraction makes a thinker all-too-concrete, “like a lamp-post,” because at its extreme limit mental consciousness turns into a non-thinking and wholly material kind of substance. “All ideals,” Lawrence ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Note
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Conclusion
• Quotations from Lawrence’s Essays
• Notes
• Works Cited