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The Plumed Serpent: D.H. Lawrence on Radical Traditionalism

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The Plumed Serpent: D.H. Lawrence on Radical Traditionalism

We must change back to the vision of the living cosmos; we must.
The oldest Pan is in us, and he will not be denied.

The Plumed Serpent is the story of an Aztec pagan revolution that spreads through Mexico during the time of the Mexican Revolution (the 1910s). Published in 1926, it also has themes of anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, romanticism, nationalism, and primal and traditional roles for men and women.

The protagonist is 40-year-old Kate Leslie, the widow of an Irish revolutionary. She’s not particularly close to her grown children from her first husband, and seeking solitude and change in the midst of her grief she settles temporarily in Mexico.

Soon she meets Don Ramón Carrasco, an intellectual who’s attempting to rid the country of Christianity and capitalism and replace them with the cult of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (“the plumed serpent”) and Mexican nationalism. He’s assisted in his vision by Don Cipriano Viedma, a general in the Mexican army. Ramón provides the leadership, poetry, and propaganda that helps the movement take off, and Cipriano lends a military counterpoint.

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Ramón writes hymns, then distributes copies to the villagers who quickly become fascinated by the idea of the old gods returning to Mexico:

Your gods are ready to return to you. Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, the old gods, are minded to come back to you. Be quiet, don’t let them find you crying and complaining. I have come from out of the lake to tell you the gods are coming back to Mexico, they are ready to return to their own home.

The Mexican commoners flock to listen as hymns are read (Mexico’s illiteracy rate was about 78 percent in 1910) (Presley). Soon the villagers are inspired to dance and drum in the native trance-inducing style that’s foreign to Christian worship, and they refuse the Church’s orders to quit listening to the Hymns of Quetzalcoatl. According to Smith, Lawrence was “interested in two related concepts of male homosociality: Männerbund and Blutbrüdershaft,” and there certainly are aspects of this in The Plumed Serpent among the Men of Quetzalcoatl. Ramón also employs an array of craftsmen to create the aesthetics for the Quetzalcoatl movement—ceremonial costumes, the Quetzalcoatl symbol in iron, and traditional Indian dress that’s adopted by the male followers.

Orchestrating a Pagan Revolution

The Plumed Serpent has been called D. H. Lawrence’s “most politically controversial novel” (Krockel). Despite its fascinating plot and the brilliant prose readers expect from Lawrence, it’s been called every name modernists can sling at a book—fascist, sexist, racist, silly, offensive, propaganda, difficult, an embarrassment. So many people have slammed the novel that when literary critic Leslie Fiedler said Lawrence had no followers—at a D.H. Lawrence festival, no less—William S. Burroughs interrupted to say how influenced he was by The Plumed Serpent (Morgan).

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A primary reason Lawrence’s book is criticized is because his vision for Mexico may have been inspired by a trip to the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, after which he spoke positively of the growing völkisch movement and its focus on pagan traditions, saying in a 1924 letter: “The ancient spirit of pre-historic Germany [is] coming back, at the end of history” (Krockel). This is a misguided view because the Quetzalcoatl movement has none of the vitriol and racism that later characterized National Socialism (a Christianity ideology). Instead, the Quetzalcoatl leaders’ plan is to unite the various ethnicities in Mexico into one pagan culture, and whites living in the country will be allowed to stay if they are peaceful.

In The Plumed Serpent, Ramón speaks of the need for every country to have its own Savior, and his vision for a traditional, anti-capitalistic society includes a rebirth of paganism for the entire world:

If I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China.

Although Lawrence’s novel has been criticized numerous times for post-colonial themes, such is an intellectually lazy and incomplete reading. According to Oh, “What Lawrence tries to do in The Plumed Serpent is the reverse of colonialist eradication of indigenous religion. The restoration of ancient Mexican religion necessarily accompanies Lawrence’s critiques of Western colonial projects.”

Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Philosophy of the Future

Ramón performs public invocations to the Aztec god and plans to proclaim himself the living Quetzalcoatl. (When the time is right, his friend Cipriano will be declared the living warrior god Huitzilopochtli, and Kate is offered a place in the pantheon as the goddess Malintzi.) But Ramón’s wife is a devout Catholic and fervently tries to convince him to stop the pagan revolution. Nietzsche was a major influence on Lawrence by the 1920s, and Ramón’s harsh diatribe to his Christian wife sounds straight out of The Genealogy of Morals:

But believe me, if the real Christ has not been able to save Mexico—and He hasn’t—then I am sure the white Anti-Christ of charity, and socialism, and politics, and reform, will only succeed in finally destroying her. That, and that alone, makes me take my stand.—You, Carlota, with your charity works and your pity: and men like Benito Juarez, with their Reform and their Liberty: and the rest of the benevolent people, politicians and socialists and so forth, surcharged with pity for living men, in their mouths, but really with hate . . .

The Plumed Serpent has been compared to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well. Both feature religious reformers intent on creating the Overman, both use pre-Christian deities in their mythos, and both proclaim that God is dead (Humma). (In a priceless scene, Ramón has Christ and the Virgin Mary retire from Mexico while he implores the villagers to call out to them, “Adiós! Say Adiós! my children.”) A brutal overturning of Christian morality is present in both narratives. In addition, Ramón teaches his people to become better than they are, to awaken the Star within them and become complete men and women.

The Plumed Serpent is an engaging handbook for initiating a pagan revival in the West. The methods employed by Ramón would be more effective in a rural society 100 years ago, but readers will likely find inspiration in the Quetzalcoatl movement’s aesthetics and success. It’s an immensely enjoyable read for anyone interested in reconstructionist paganism or radical traditionalism.

Endnotes:

Humma, John B. Metaphor and Meaning in D.H. Lawrence’s Later Novels. University of Missouri (1990).

Krockel, Carl. D.H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence. Editions Rodopi BV (2007).

Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. W. W. Norton (2012).

Oh, Eunyoung. D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing: Colonialism in His Travel Writing and Leadership Novels. Routledge (2014).

Presley, James. “Mexican Views on Rural Education, 1900-1910.” The Americas, Vol. 20, No. 1 (July 1963), pp. 64-71.

Smith, Jad. “Völkisch Organicism and the Use of Primitivism in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.D.H. Lawrence Review, 30:3. (2002)

For more posts on radical traditionalism and Julius Evola, please visit the archives here.

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dimanche, 13 août 2017 | Lien permanent

D. H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence

Ex: http://www.oswaldmosley.com/

D.H. Lawrence 1885-1930 is acknowledged as one of the most influential novelists of the 20th Century. He wrote novels and poetry as acts of polemic and prophecy. For Lawrence saw himself as both a prophet and the harbinger of a New Dawn and as a leader-saviour who would sacrificially accept the tremendous responsibilities of political power as a dictator so that humanity could be free to get back to being human.

Much of Lawrence's outlook is reminiscent of Jung and Nietzsche but, although he was acquainted with the works of both, his philosophy developed independently. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, a coal-mining town near Nottingham, into a family of colliers. His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother's commitment to Christianity imbued the house with continual tension between the parents. At college, he was an agnostic and determined to become a poet and an author. Having rejected the faith of his mother, Lawrence also rejected the counter-faith of science, democracy, industrialisation and the mechanisation of man.

LOVE, POWER AND THE "DARK LORD"

dh-lawrence.jpgFor Lawrence capitalism destroyed the soul and the mystery of life, as did democracy and equality. He devoted most of his life to finding a new-yet-old religion that will return the mystery to life and reconnect humanity to the cosmos.

His religion was animistic and pantheistic, seeing the soul as pervasive, God as nature, and humanity as the way God is self-realised. The relations between all things are based on duality -opposites in tension. This duality is expressed in two ways: love and power. One without the other results in imbalance. Hence, to Lawrence, the love of Christianity is a sentimentality that destroys the natural hierarchy of social relations and the inequality between individuals. The critique of Christianity is reminiscent of Nietzsche.

Love and power are the two "threat vibrations" which hold individuals together, and emanate unconsciously from the leadership class. With power, there is trust, fear and obedience. With love, there is "protection" and "the sense of safety". Lawrence considers that most leaders have been out of balance with one or the other. That is the message of his novel Kangaroo. Here the Englishman Richard Lovat Somers although attracted to the fascist ideology of "Kangaroo" and his Diggers movement, ultimately rejects it as representing the same type of enervating love as Christianity, the love of the masses, and pursues his own individuality. The question for Somers is that of accepting his own dark master (Jung's Shadow of the repressed unconscious). Until that returns no human lordship can be accepted:

"He did not yet submit to the fact of what he HALF knew: that before mankind would accept any man for a king. Before Harriet would ever accept him, Richard Lovat as a lord and master he, this self-same Richard who was strong on kingship, must open the doors of his soul and let in a dark lord and master for himself, the dark god he had sensed outside the door. Let him once truly submit to the dark majesty, creaking open his doors to this fearful god who is master, and entering us from below, the lower doors; let himself once admit a master, the unspeakable god: the rest would happen."

What is required, once the dark lord has returned to men's souls in place of undifferentiated 'love' is a social order based on a hierarchical pyramid culminating in a dictator. The dictator would relieve the masses of the burden of democracy. This new social order would be based on the balance of power and love, something of a return to the medieval ideal of protection and obedience.

The ordinary folk would gain a new worth by giving obedience to the leader, who would in turn assume an awesome responsibility and would lead by virtue of his being "circuited" to the cosmos. Through such a redeeming philosopher-king individuals could reconnect cosmically and assume Heroic proportions through obedience to Heroes.

"Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and you become yourself heroic, it is the law of man."

HEROIC VITALISM
Hence, heroic vitalism is central to Lawrence's ideas. His whole political concept is antithetical to what he called "the three fanged serpent of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Instead, "you must have a government based on good, better and best."

In 1921 he wrote: "I don't believe in either liberty or democracy. I believe in actual, sacred, inspired authority." It is mere intellect, soulless and mechanistic, which is at the root of our problems; it restrains the passions and kills the natural.

His essay on Lady Chatterley's Lover deals with the social question. It is the mechanistic, arising from pure intellect, devoid of emotion, passion and all that is implied in the blood (instinct) that has caused the ills of modern society.

"This again is the tragedy of social Itfe today. In the old England, the curious blood connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant violent, bullying and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood stream. We feel it in Defoe or Fielding. And then in the mean Jane Austen, it is gone...So, in Lady Chatterley's Lover we have a man, Sir Clifford, who is purely a personality, having lost entirely all connection with his fellow men and women, except those of usage. All warmth is gone entirely, the hearth is cold the heart does not humanly exist. He is a pure product of our civilisation, but he is the death of the great humanity of the world."

Against this pallid intellectualism, the product the late cycle of a civilisation, writing in 1913 Lawrence posited: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."

The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals were products of their time and the century before. They are detached from tradition, uprooted, alienated bereft of instinct and feeling. The first 'Thinkers of the Blood' championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious, if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of mass-man in a perverse manner that would, if communism were universally triumphant, mean the destruction of their own liberty to create above and beyond the state commissariats.

Lawrence believed that socialistic agitation and unrest would create the climate, in which he would be able to gather around him "a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit" to take over authority in a fascist like coup, "then I shall come into my own."

Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic, and his idea of society organic.

Against this pallid intellectualism, the product the late cycle of a civilisation, writing in 1913 Lawrence posited: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds but what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."

The great cultural figures of our time, including Lawrence, Yeats, Pound and Hamsun, were Thinkers of the Blood, men of instinct, which has permanence and eternity. Rightly, the term intellectual became synonymous since the 1930s with the "Left", but these intellectuals were products of their time and the century before. They are detached from tradition, uprooted, alienated bereft of instinct and feeling. The first 'Thinkers of the Blood' championed excellence and nobility, influenced greatly by Nietzsche, and were suspicious, if not terrified of the mass levelling results of democracy and its offspring communism. In democracy and communism, they saw the destruction of culture as the pursuit of the sublime. Their opposite numbers, the intellectuals of the Left, celebrated the rise of mass-man in a perverse manner that would, if communism were universally triumphant, mean the destruction of their own liberty to create above and beyond the state commissariats.

Lawrence believed that socialistic agitation and unrest would create the climate, in which he would be able to gather around him "a choice minority, more fierce and aristocratic in spirit" to take over authority in a fascist like coup, "then I shall come into my own."

Lawrence's rebellion is against that late or winter phase of civilisation, which the West has entered as, described by Spengler. It is marked by the rise of the city over the village, of money over blood connections. Like Spengler, Lawrence's conception of history is cyclic, and his idea of society organic.

RELIGION OLD AND NEW
Lawrence sought a return to the pagan outlook with its communion with life and the cosmic rhythm. He was drawn to blood mysticism and what he called the dark gods. It was the 'Dark God' that embodied all that had been repressed by late civilisation and the artificial world of money and industry. His quest took him around the world. Reaching New Mexico in 1922, he observed the rituals of the Pueblo Indians. He then went to Old Mexico where he then stayed for several years.

It was in Mexico that he encountered the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, of the Aztecs. Through a revival of this deity and the reawakening of the long repressed primal urges, Lawrence thought that Europe might be renewed. To the USA, he advised that it should look to the land before the Spaniards and the Pilgrim Fathers and embrace the 'black demon of savage America'. This 'demon' is akin to Jung's concept of the Shadow, (and its embodiment in what Jung called the "Devil archetype"), and bringing it to consciousness is required for true wholeness or individuation.

Turn to "the unresolved, the rejected", Lawrence advised the Americans (Phoenix). He regarded his novel The Plumed Serpent as his most important; the story of a white women who becomes immersed in a social and religious movement of national regeneration among the Mexicans, based on a revival of the worship of Quetzalcoatl.

Through the American Indians Lawrence hoped to see a lesson for Europe. He has one of the leaders of the Quetzalcoatl revival, Don Ramon, say: "I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan and the tree Yggdrasill...".

Looking about Europe for such a heritage, he found it among the Etruscans and the Druids. Yet although finding his way back to the spirituality that had once been part of Europe, Lawrence does not advocate a mimicing of ancient ways for the present time; nor the adoption of alien spirituality for the European West, as is the fetish among many alienated souls today who look at every culture and heritage except their own. He wishes to return to the substance, to the awe before the mystery of life. "My way is my own, old red father: I can't cluster at the drum anymore", he writes in his essay Indians and an Englishman. Yet what he found among the Indians was a far off innermost place at the human core, the ever present as he describes the way Kate is affected by the ritual she witnesses among the followers of Quetzalcoatl.

In The Woman Who Rode Away the wife of a mine owner tired of her life leaves to find a remote Indian hill tribe who are said to preserve the rituals of the old gods. She is told that the whites have captured the sun and she is to be the messenger to tell them to return him. She is sacrificed to the sun... It is a sacrifice of a product of the mechanistic society for a reconnection with the cosmos. For Lawrence the most value is to be had in "the life that arises from the blood"

THE LION, THE UNICORN AND THE CROWN
Lawrence's concept of the dual nature of life, in which there is continual conflict between polarities, is a dialectic that is synthe-sised. Lawrence uses symbolism to describe this. The lion (the mind and the active male principle) is at eternal strife with the unicorn (senses, passive, female). But for one to completely kill the other would result in its own extinction and a vacuum would be created around the victory. This is so with ideologies, religions and moralities that stand for the victory of one polarity, and the repression of the other. The crown belongs to neither. It stands above both as the symbol of balance. This is something of a Tao for the West, of what Jung sought also, and of what the old alchemists quested on an individual basis.

The problems Lawrence brought under consideration have become ever more acute as our late cycle of Western civilisation draws to a close, dominated by money and the machine. Lawrence, like Yeats, Hamsun, Williamson and others, sought a return to the Eternal, by reconnecting that part of ourselves that has been deeply repressed by the "loathsome spirit of the age".


Kerry Bolton

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mardi, 15 juin 2010 | Lien permanent

D. H. Lawrence on America

D. H. Lawrence on America

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

LAW1.jpgI have contributed several essays to Counter-Currents dealing with D. H. Lawrence’s critique of modernity. Those essays might lead the reader to believe that Lawrence treats modernity as a universal ideology or worldview that could be found anywhere.

However, in many of his writings Lawrence treats modernity as, in effect, a spiritual disease that specifically afflicts white, northern Europeans. Everything I have said in other essays about the modern overemphasis on the “spiritual sympathetic centres” and how we starve the “lower centres” in favor of the upper, or how love and benevolence are our undoing, Lawrence usually frames in explicitly racial terms. Modernity, in other words, is the condition of white, Northern European peoples, the peoples who initiated modernity in the first place.

In a letter from October 8, 1924, when he was living in New Mexico, Lawrence writes: “I loathe winter. They gas about the Nordic races, over here, but I believe they’re dead, dead, dead. I hate all that comes from the north.” Like Nietzsche, Lawrence does not lament the “death” (or decline) of the Nordic races. He merely observes it. Nor, generally speaking, does he fall into the common error of romanticizing other races. (However, he does on occasion contrast “northern” to “southern” culture, usually to the detriment of the former.)

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich represents the white race in general; his life is an allegory of what Lawrence believes is wrong with the “northern people,” and his death symbolizes what Lawrence regarded as their degeneration. Early in the novel, Gudrun Brangwen reacts to him:

There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. . . . “His totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself.

Later in the novel, Birkin reflects on Gerald: “He was one of these strange white wonderful demons of the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold?”

Like Gerald’s, the end of the white race shall be an ice death: a death brought about by cold ideals and abstractions; a cutting off from the source, from the life mystery. “The white races, having the Arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfill a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation.” It is a self-destruction, just as Gerald’s death is self-destruction.

The Great Death Continent

Though the process of snow-abstract annihilation began in Northern Europe, for Lawrence the “epicenter” of the process has shifted to North America. Lawrence’s most dramatic statement of this occurs in one of his last books, The Plumed Serpent, in a passage so important that I shall quote it at length:

Was that the clue to America, she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up? The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God? Was that America? . . .

And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism.—And would the great negative pull of the Americas at last break the heart of the world? . . .

White men had had a soul, and lost it. The pivot of fire had been quenched in them, and their lives had started to spin in the reversed direction, widdershins [counterclockwise]. That reversed look which is in the eyes of so many white people, the look of nullity, and life wheeling in the reversed direction. Widdershins. . . .

And all the efforts of white men to bring the soul of the dark men of Mexico into final clenched being has resulted in nothing but the collapse of the white men. Against the soft, dark flow of the Indian the white man at last collapses, with his god and his energy he collapses. In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up. Seeking to save another man’s soul, the white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself.

There is much to digest in this passage. Lawrence is suggesting that America (by which he means North America, including Mexico and Canada) acts as a vast engine of negation, wiping away or adulterating all human characteristics and all human distinctions that are “natural,” and doing so in the name of the Ideals of democracy and materialism (i.e., commerce).

Second, Lawrence is suggesting that the soul of the “dark man” is fundamentally different from that of the white man (a point he makes again and again in the Mexican writings) and that the white man’s soul has not been shifted to the “upper centres,” or knocked widdershins and out of touch with the life mystery. Therefore, all the efforts by the white man to “civilize” the dark man are in vain and it is the latter that will in fact win the day, because in some primal sense he is “stronger.” America, in short, is the continent of nihilism; the lead actor in the final drama of white, western civilization, the Ragnarok.

One of Lawrence’s heresies is to believe in essential national and racial characters. Culture, for Lawrence, flows from natural differences between human beings—and this means that humans are not fundamentally malleable and interchangeable; certain cultures simply cannot be fitted to certain people. Nevertheless, Lawrence does not believe in any doctrine of racial superiority. (The references that Lawrence makes from time to time to an “Aryan race” and, more narrowly, to the “Nordic” type may raise eyebrows today, but such terminology was common for the time.)

The Studies in Classical American Literature

Much of Studies in Classical American Literature (1923) is devoted to developing these points. This book—one of Lawrence’s most entertaining—is misleadingly titled for it is really not so much about American literature as it is about America itself. Note that in the quote above from The Plumed Serpent Lawrence refers to America as the continent “whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God.”

The first essay in Studies is entitled “The Spirit of Place,” Lawrence explains this term as follows:

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.

America’s spirit of place, Lawrence tell us, is one which draws men who want to “get away” and to be masterless. It is the land of those drawn to a kind of negative freedom: not the freedom actually to be something, but, in essence, the freedom to not have to be anything at all, and especially not to be subject to another’s will. But as Hegel recognized this negative freedom—freedom to say no—does not translate into any positive sort of freedom at all. True freedom, Lawrence states, only comes about through finding something you “positively want to be.” Americans, on the other hand, “have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.”

The spirit of America, for Lawrence, thus begins to resemble very much the spirit of Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love: negation; a fierce desire really to be nothing at all. This is American “freedom.” America is the land where the white race has gone to die, and to literally kill all its old forms: its traditions, customs, blood-ties, myths and folktales, morality, religion, high culture, even its memory of its past.

America is the land where men have come to free themselves of everything in life that is unchosen, especially when the unchosen is the natural. Again, there is a break from the primal self or true unconscious and a shift to life lived entirely from the Ideal “upper centres.” Lawrence writes, “The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny. It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness. And he’s got to do it secretly. As the growing of a dragon-fly inside a chrysalis or cocoon destroys the larva grub, secretly.”

The self-destruction of the white man takes place secretly, marching under the banner of the Ideal. America is the land where all the old forms are destroyed in the name of “Freedom,” “Democracy,” and, above all else, “Progress”:

Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the under-consciousness [of Americans]. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper-consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.

The cause of Liberty in Europe, Lawrence tells us, was something vital and life-giving. But he detects in American icons like Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson something strident, cold, and life-killing in their appeals to Democracy. American democracy, Lawrence claims, is at root a kind of “self-murder”; that is, when it is not “murdering somebody else.”

Lawrence’s analyses of American literature basically consist in showing how these American tendencies play themselves out in authors like Franklin, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and others. Whitman—an author with whom Lawrence had a love-hate relationship—gets by far the roughest treatment:

ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along [in] it. . . .

ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.

ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.

ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.

law2.jpgIt is Lawrence’s analysis of Melville’s Moby Dick, however, that is perhaps his most incisive. He sees in this simple story an encapsulation of the American spirit, the American thanatos itself. Here is Lawrence summing up his interpretation:

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

When a people loses a sense of blood-relatedness, what basis is there for community? American community is not based on blood ties, shared history, shared religion, or shared culture: it is based on ideology. He who professes the American creed is an American—he who does not is an outcast.

The American creed is based principally on a belief in freedom, equality, and Progress. For Lawrence, the first of these is (in its American form) empty, and the other two are a lie. American equality is a lie because in fact people are not equal, and virtually everyone realizes this in their heart of hearts.

American ethics requires, however, that everyone pay lip service to the idea that no one is, or can be, fundamentally better than anyone else. This is one of the country’s core beliefs. In fact, Lawrence points out that this is so fundamental to being an American that Americans are terrified lest they somehow let on to their fellow countryman that they really don’t believe that everyone is equal, or that all opinions are equally valid and valuable. They are afraid of seeming “judgmental,” and they parrot an absurd relativism in order to be seen by others as “tolerant.” Lawrence writes of America, “I have never been in a country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.”

Essentially the same point was made by Alexis de Tocqueville. In his Democracy in America, Tocqueville includes a section titled “The Power Exercised by the Majority in America over Thought,” and writes as follows:

I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America. . . . In America the majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it. . . . Before he goes into print, he believes he has supporters; but he feels that he has them no more once he stands revealed to all, for those who condemn him express their views loudly, while those who think as he does, but without his courage, retreat into silence as if ashamed of having told the truth. . . . Hence the majority lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration; only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain truths to the Americans’ attention. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence [New York: Doubleday, 1969], 254–55)

A creedal state such as America is as intolerant as a creedal religion. A Jew who does not believe in the Exodus story does not cease thereby to be a Jew, since being Jewish is an ethnic as well as a religious identification. Similarly, Hinduism (another ethnic religion) tolerates and subsumes a vast number of doctrines and differences of emphasis. (It is even possible, in a certain sense, to be an atheist Hindu.) Christianity and Islam, however, are creedal religions and therefore much less tolerant of doctrinal deviations. One can stop being a Christian or a Muslim—immediately—by believing or not believing certain things.

America early on divided itself into ethnic communities—the English, the Germans, the Irish, etc. A genuine spirit of community existed within these groups, in virtue of their blood ties and shared history, culture, and religion. But gradually these communities mixed and lost their unique identities. The creed of “Americanism” was the only thing that then arose as something that was supposed to bind people together. But since Americanism consists mostly of the recognition of negative liberties, how effective could it be at creating community? The result is that Americans became increasingly alienated from each other.

In his Preface to Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1929) Lawrence speaks of the breakdown in America of “blood-sympathy” and argues that it is responsible for a seldom-discussed facet of the American character, one which Europeans find particularly strange and amusing: the American pre-occupation with hygiene and super-cleanliness:

Once the blood-sympathy breaks . . . human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually. The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American “plumbing,” American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and antiseptic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about “halitosis,” or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don’t mind hideous litter of tin cans and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement.

With the blood-sympathy broken, Americans seek as much as possible to isolate themselves from their fellow citizens, who they fear and find repulsive. In his essay “Men Must Work and Women as Well,” Lawrence writes presciently of how technology serves to abstract us from human relationships: “The film, the radio, the gramophone were all invented because physical effort and physical contact have become repulsive to us.”

The radio and the gramophone brought individuals and families indoors and isolated them in their individual dwellings. No longer did they sit on their front porches and converse with their neighbors. The rise of the automobile contributed to this as well. Front porches were built for the cleaner, slower paced horse-and-buggy days. Sitting on the front porch was no longer so attractive when it meant being subjected to the noise and exhaust of automobiles whizzing by. Architecture began to reflect this change in the early part of the twentieth century, with designs for new houses sometimes eliminating the front porch altogether, and often with entrances concealed from view.

In the early days of the radio and the gramophone, only some families owned them, and they would often invite the neighbors in to listen to the gramophone or to the radio. This was also the case in the early days of television. But as these technologies became cheaper, just about every family acquired them and instead of facilitating social interaction they came to positively inhibit it. One can see this same phenomenon playing itself out in an even more radical way in the age of personal computers. It is now quite common for many Americans to live almost completely isolated lives, interacting with others via the Internet and carrying on “virtual relationships.”

Progressively, the lives of Americans became denuded of most of the features that have made life worth living throughout human history: community, extended family relations, participation in rituals, customs, traditions, remembrance of the past through shared stories, and the transmission of folk wisdom through myths, fables, and songs. The lives of most Americans became entirely dominated by the concerns of what Hegel called bürgerliche Gesellschaft, or “bourgeois society”: the realm of commerce.

“Getting ahead” becomes the primary concern in life, and all else—all the products of High Culture and most of the simple pleasures of life—become distractions, impracticalities. In his essay “Europe v. America,” Lawrence writes that “the American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.”

This is the secret to much of the inadequacy that Americans still feel when in Europe or in European company. Partly it is the (usually correct) sense that Europeans are better educated. But it is also the sense that these people have mastered the art of life. Life for most Americans is a problem to be solved, something we will eventually be able to do better than the Old World, thanks to the marriage of commerce and science.

Hence the tendency of Americans to believe anything that is asserted by scientists and medical men, no matter how ridiculous and ill-founded, and to distrust all that comes from tradition and “the past.” As witness the bizarre American reliance on “self-help books” and “how-to” manuals, even on such subjects as making friends or raising children. Americans are aware that these things were done in the past, without manuals, but believe that “experts” can teach us how to do them better than they have ever been done before.

While we wait for science to tell us how to live, life slips by. As Lawrence writes in a letter, “They can’t trust life until they can control it. So much for them—cowards! You can have the Land of the Free, as much as I know of it.”

Perhaps Lawrence’s most eloquent and succinct summation of the difference between the New World and the Old comes is the following line from “Europe v. America”: “The Europeans still have a vague idea that the universe is greater than they are, and isn’t going to change very radically, not for all the telling of all men put together.”

With life narrowed to the concerns of “getting ahead,” and natural human sympathies submerged or obliterated, Americans began to see each other more and more merely as objects: as consumers, or competitors, or employees, or bosses, but seldom as flesh and blood human beings. Thus we find the terrible American record of exploitation of the workers; frauds committed against the consumers, often at the expense of their health or even their lives; the devastation of communities wrought by the dumping of industrial waste; and the dumping of armies of workers in massive “layoffs.”

Heidegger was right: in its disregard for human life, American capitalism reveals itself as metaphysically identical to communism. And like communism, it tramples human life in the name of Progress. In its paper-thin idealism, its inhumanity, its self-destructiveness, and in its uncertainty of exactly what it is or should be, America is Women in Love’s Gerald Crich made real on a vast scale. Or, rather, Gerald Crich—coupled with the nihilism of Gudrun Brangwen—is the spirit of America. (Remember, those two are a couple: they complement one another. See my essay on Women in Love.)

The spirit of America—at once nihilism and “benevolent” idealism—can be seen very clearly in how it has treated other peoples both on its own soil and abroad. Earlier we saw in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence commenting on the white man’s attempt to “civilize” the “dark men.” Why do Americans feel that they must bend others to their way of life? American universalism leads to the belief that inside every foreigner is an American just screaming to get out.

Americans are like fresh converts to a religion, who feel that they have to convert all their friends—subconsciously in order to reassure themselves that they have made a sound choice. Americans have given up so much that was once thought to be essential to life and to community—so they simply must be right; others must find their way the most desirable way. If they do not, then they are ignorant and don’t know what’s good for them; or their governments have prevented them from seeing the truth.

Americans have been converting foreigners into Americans for a long time now, through exporting their consumer culture (irresistibly appealing to the baser elements in all peoples), and through less peaceable means.

On their own soil, white Americans have also tried to convert the “dark man” to Americanism. In his essay “Certain Americans and an Englishman,”  Lawrence speaks of Americans trying to turn the Red Man into a “wage earner.” This can be done, up to a point, but at the price of the Red Man sacrificing his soul. But ultimately Lawrence believes there can be no true harmony between different races, because they are so different, and that the attempts of white men to create “multicultural societies” will end in the destruction of the whites (an outcome he does not particularly lament).

Writing of Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in Studies, Lawrence states that he only wanted to know the Red Man in his head, abstractly because “he must have suspected that the moment he saw as the savages saw, all his fraternity and equality would go up in smoke, and his ideal world of pure sweet goodness along with it.” Later on in Studies, Lawrence writes that “The Red Man and the White Man are not blood-brothers: even when they are most friendly. When they are most friendly, it is as a rule the one betraying his race-spirit to the other.”

Lawrence’s views on America are apocalyptic. He sees no hope for the country, and seems to believe that it will drag the rest of the white world down with it. What, then, are we to make of these extreme views? Much of what Lawrence has to say about the emptiness of American ideals, and the emptiness of American lives, presages arguments that would be made by numerous social critics years later, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. I am thinking of such writers as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Christopher Lasch, and Daniel Bell. Much of what he has to say would strike any Leftist as uncontroversial.

But once again Lawrence shows himself to be a kind of political hybrid, for his remarks on race, his opposition to the ideal of equality, and his opposition to multiculturalism seem to put him, by today’s standards, on the extreme right. Of course, contrary to what many Leftists might think, simply to point this out does not serve to refute Lawrence. Nor is it entirely convincing to accuse him of inconsistency: perhaps it is today’s Leftists and Rightists who are confused. And there is some plausibility to this suggestion.

For example, leftists today advocate both multiculturalism and “diversity,” which they tend to equate. But it is hard to see how the latter can be preserved if the former is achieved. In other words, inevitably a multicultural society would lead to the blending of peoples and the blending and watering-down of cultures, thus potentially destroying diversity rather than maintaining it. Lawrence challenges us to critique our own views, and to question their consistency—and their sanity.

There is no easy, ready-to-hand answer to Lawrence’s charges—about America in particular, or modernity in general. They strike at the heart of what is believed by most people in the West today. Whatever else one may say about his views, it is striking how their capacity to shock and to challenge us has only increased over the years.

Lire la suite

samedi, 29 janvier 2011 | Lien permanent

Filippo Marinetti

marinetti-Futurismo.jpgFilippo Marinetti

Kerry BOLTON
 
 
Filippo Marinetti is unlike most of the post-nineteenth Century cultural avant-garde who were rebelling against the spirit of several centuries of liberalism, rationalism, the rise of the democratic mass, industrialism, and the rule of the moneyed elite. His revolt against the leveling impact of the democratic era was not to hark back to certain perceived ‘golden ages’ such as the medieval eras upheld by Yeats and Evola, or to reject technology in favor of a return to rural life, as advocated by Henry Williamson and Knut Hamsun. To the contrary, Marinetti embraced the new facts of technology, the machine, speed, and dynamic energy, in a movement called Futurism.

The futurist response to the facts of the new age is therefore a quite unique reaction from the anti-liberal literati and artists and one that continues to influence certain aspects of industrial and post-industrial sub cultures. An example of a contemporary cultural movement paralleling Futurists is New Slovenian Art, which like futurism embodies music, graphic arts, architecture, and drama. It is a movement whose influence is felt beyond the borders of Slovenia. The best-known manifestation of this art form is the industrial music group Laibach.

Marinetti is also the inventor of free verse in poetry, and Futurist adherents have had a lasting impact on architecture, motion pictures and the theater. The Futurists were the pioneers of street theatre. They inspired both the Constructivist movement in the USSR and the English Vorticists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

Marinetti was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1876. He graduated in law in Genoa in 1899. Although the political and philosophical aspects of the course held his interest, he traveled frequently between France and Italy and interested himself in the avant-garde arts of the later nineteenth Century promoting young poets in both countries. He was already a strong critic of the conservative and traditional approaches of Italian poets. He was at this time an enthusiast for the modern, revolutionary music of Wagner, seeing it as assailing “equilibrium and sobriety . . . meditation and silence . . . ”

By 1904, Futurist elements had manifested in his writing, particularly in his poem Destruction that he called “an erotic and anarchist poem,” a eulogy to the “avenging sea” as a symbol of revolution. After an apocalyptic destruction, the process of rebuilding begins on the ruins of the “Old World.” Here already is the praise of death as a dynamic and transformative.

With the death of Marinetti’s father in 1907, his wealth allowed him to travel widely and he became a well-known cultural figure throughout Europe. Nietzsche was at this time one of the most well-known intellectuals who desired liberation from the old order. Nietzsche was widely read among the literati of Italy, and D’Annunzio was the most prominent in promoting Nietzsche. Among the other philosophers of particular importance whom Marinetti studied was the French syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, who inclined towards the anarchism of Proudhon. This rejected Marxism in favor of a society comprised of small productive, cooperative units or syndicates; and founded a new myth of heroic action and struggle. Rejecting much of the pacifism of the left. Sorel viewed war as a dynamic of human action. Sorel in turn was himself influenced by Nietzsche, and applying the Nietzschean Overman to socialism, states that the working class revolution requires heroic leaders. Sorel became influential not only among Left wing syndicalists but also among certain radical nationalists in both France and Italy.

Futurist Manifesto

Marinetti’s artistic ideas crystallized in the Futurist movement that originated from a meeting of artists and musicians in Milan in 1909 to draft a Futurist Manifesto. With Marinetti were Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. The manifesto was first published in the Parisian paper Le Figaro, and exhorted youth to, “Sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.”

marinetti02The Futurists were contemptuous of all tradition, of all that is past:

We want to exult aggressive motion . . . we affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.

The machine was poetically eulogized. The racing car became the icon of the new epoch, “which seems to run as a machine gun.” The Futurist aesthetic was to be joy in violence and war, as “the sole hygiene of the world.” Motion, dynamic energy, action, and heroism were the foundations of “the culture of the Futurist future. The fisticuffs, the sprint and the kick were expressions of culture. The Futurist Manifesto is as much a challenge to the political and social order as it is to the status quo in the arts.

It declared:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of an explosive breath–a roaring car that seems to ride on grape shot is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

7. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries. Why should we look back when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

8. We will glorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, the beautiful ideas that kill, and scorn for women.

9. We will destroy the museums libraries academies of every kind, will fight moralism feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

10. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot. We will sing of the multi-colored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modem capitals, we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric motors, greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents, factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon: deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing: and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries! . . .  Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day, that we grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that . . .  but I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot? And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely? Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you then wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth we tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner . . .  But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . .  Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . .  Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . .  Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts–we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing dog-like at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won’t be there . . .  At last they’ll find us–one winter’s night–in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us. Driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power, have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting . . . Look at us We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed . . .  Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again, we hurl our defiance at the stars.

You have objections?–Enough! Enough! We know them . . .  We’ve understood! . . .  Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors–Perhaps! . . .  If only it were so!–But who cares? We don’t want to understand! . . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads. Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance after stars!”

A plethora of manifestos by Marinetti and his colleagues followed, futurist cinema, painting, music (“noise”), prose, plus the political and sociological implications.

War, the World’s Only Hygiene

Marinetti’s manifesto on war shows the central place violence and conflict have in the Futurist doctrine.

We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague. We have recently had the pleasure of fighting in the streets with the most fervent adversaries of the war and shouting in their faces our firm beliefs:

1. All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being cowardly.

2. Let it be proclaimed that the word Italy should prevail over the word Freedom.

3. Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be canceled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater.

For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the martial fervor throughout the nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of Pan-Italianism.

Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnel and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.

Artistic Storm Trooper

Marinetti brought his dynamic character into an aggressive campaign to promote Futurism. The Futurists aimed to aggravate society out of bourgeoisie complacency and the safe existence through innovative street theater, abrasive art, speeches, and manifestos. The speaking style of Marinetti was itself bombastic and thunderous. The art was aggravating to conventional society and the art establishment. If a painting was that of a man with a mustache, the whiskers would be depicted with the bristles of a shaving brush pasted onto the canvas. A train would be depicted with the words “puff, puff.”

Both the words and deeds of the Futurists matched the nature of the art in expressing contempt for the status quo with its preoccupation with “pastism” or the “passe.” Marinetti for example, described Venice as “a city of dead fish and decaying houses, inhabited by a race of waiters and touts.”

To the Futurist Boccioni, Dante, Beethoven and Michelangelo were “sickening” Whilst Carra set about painting sounds, noises and even smells. Marinetti traversed Europe giving interviews, arranging exhibitions, meetings and dinners. Vermilion posters with huge block letters spelling ‘futurism’ were plastered throughout Italy on factories, in dance halls, cafes and town squares. Futurist performances were organized to provoke riot. Glue was put onto seats. Two tickets for the same seat would be sold to provoke a fight. “Noise music” would blare while poetry or manifestos were recited and paintings shown. Fruit and rotten spaghetti would be thrown from the audience, and the performances would usually end in brawls.

Marinetti replied to jeers with humor. He ate the fruit thrown at him. He welcomed the hostility as proving that Futurism was not appealing to the mediocre.

Politics

Portrait of Marinetti by Carlo Carra

 

The first political contacts of Marinetti and the Futurists were from the Left rather than the Right, despite Marinetti’s extreme nationalism and call for war as the “hygiene of mankind.” There were syndicalists and even some anarchists who shared Marinetti’s views on the energizing and revolutionary nature of war and gave him a reception.

In 1909, Marinetti entered the general elections and issued a “First Political Manifesto” which is anti-clerical and states that the only Futurist political program is “national pride,” calling for the elimination of pacifism and the representatives of the old order. During that year, Marinetti was heavily involved in agitating for Italian sovereignty over Austrian-ruled Trieste. The political alliance with the extreme Left began with the anarcho-syndicalist Ottavio Dinale, whose paper reprinted the Futurist manifesto. The paper, La demolizione was not especially anarcho-syndicalist, but of a general combative nature, aiming to unite into one “fascio” all those of revolutionary tendencies, to “oppose with full energy the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life.” The phrase is distinctly Futurist.

Marinetti announced that he intended to campaign politically as both a syndicalist and a nationalist, a synthesis that would eventually arise in Fascism. In 1910, he forged links with the Italian Nationalist Association, which from its birth also had a pro-labor, syndicalist aspect. In 1913 a Futurist political manifesto was issued which called for enlargement of the military, an “aggressive foreign policy,” colonial expansionism, and “pan-Italianism”; a “cult” of progress, speed, and heroism; opposition to the nostalgia for monuments, ruins, and museums; economic protectionism, anti-socialism, anti-clericalism. The movement gained wide enthusiasm among university students.

Interventionism

The chance for Italy’s “place in the sun” came with World War I. Not only the nationalists were demanding Italy’s entry into the war, but so too were certain revolutionary syndicalists and a faction of socialists led by Mussolini. From the literati came D’Annunzio and Marinetti.

In a manifesto addressed to students in 1914 Marinetti states the purpose of Futurism and calls for intervention in the war. Futurism was the “doctor” to cure Italy of “pastism,” a remedy “valid for every country.” The “ancestor cult far from cementing the race” was making Italians “anaemic and putrid.” Futurism was now “being fully realized in the great world war.”

The present war is the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far been seen. Futurism was the militarization of innovating artists.

The war would sweep away all the proponents of the old and senile, diplomats, professors, philosophers, archaeologists, libraries, and museums.

The war will promote gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, business and industrialists. The war will rejuvenate Italy: will enrich her with men of action, will force her to live no longer off the past, off ruins and the mild climate, but off her own national forces.

The Futurists were the first to organize pro-war protests. Mussolini and Marinetti held their first joint meeting in Milan on March 31st 1915. In April, both were arrested in Rome for organizing a demonstration.

Futurists were no mere windbags. Nearly all distinguished themselves in the war, as did Mussolini and D’Annunzio. The Futurist architect Sant Elia was killed. Marinetti enlisted with the Alpini regiment and was wounded and decorated for valor.

Futurist Party

Ritratto di Marinetti by Thayat

 

In 1918, Marinetti began directing his attention to a new postwar Italy. He published a manifesto announcing the Futurist Political Party, which called for “Revolutionary nationalism” for both imperialism and social revolution. “We must carry our war to total victory.”

Demands of the manifesto included the eight hour day and equal pay for women, the nationalization and redistribution of land to veterans; heavy taxes on acquired and inherited wealth and the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce; a strong Italy freed, from nostalgia, tourists, and priests; industrialization and modernization of “moribund cities” that live as tourist centers. A Corporatist policy called for the abolition of parliament and its replacement with a technical government of 30 or 40 young directors elected form the trade associations.

The Futurist party concentrated its propaganda on the soldiers, and recruited many war veterans of the elite Arditi (daredevils), who had been the black-shirted shock troops of the army who would charge into battle stripped to the waist, a grenade in each hand and a dagger between their teeth.

In December 1919, the Futurists revived the “Fasci” or “groups.” which had been organized in 1914 and 1915 to campaign for war intervention, and from which was to emerge the Fascists.

Futurists and Fascists

The first joint post-war action between Mussolini and Marinetti took place in 1919 when a Socialist Party rally was disrupted in Milan.

That year Mussolini founded his own Fasci di Combattimento in Milan with the support of Marinetti and the poet Ungasetti. The futurists and the Arditi comprised the core of the Fascist leadership. The first Fascist manifesto was based on that of Marinetti’s Futurist party.

In April, against the wishes of Mussolini who thought the action premature, Marinetti led Fascists and Futurists and Arditi against a mass Socialist Party demonstration. Marinetti waded in with fists, but intervened to save a socialist from being severely beaten by Arditi. (To place the post-war situation in perspective, the Socialists had regularly beaten, abused, and even killed returning war veterans). The Fascists and futurists then proceeded to the offices of the Socialist Party paper Avanti, which they sacked and burned.

Marinetti stood as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections and persuaded Toscanini to do so. Whilst the Fascists held back, the Futurists threw their support behind the poet-soldier D’Annunzio’s takeover of Fiume. Marinetti arrived and was warmly welcomed by D’Annunzio.

When the Fascist Congress of 1920 refused to support the Futurist demand to exile the King and the Pope, Marinetti and other Futurists resigned from the Fascist party. Marinetti considered that the Fascist party was compromising with conservatism and the bourgeoisie. He was also critical of the Fascist concentration on anti-socialist agitation and on opposition to strikes. Certain futurist factions realigned themselves specifically with the extreme Left. In 1922, there were several Futurist exhibitions and performances organized by the Communist cultural association, Pro-letkul, which also arranged a lecture by Marinetti to explain the doctrine of Futurism.

Futurism and the Fascist Regime

mussolini

 

When the Fascists assumed power in 1922 Marinetti, like D’Annunzio, was critically supportive of the regime. Marinetti considered: “The coming to power of the Fascists constitutes the realization of the minimum futurist program.”

Of Mussolini the statesman, Marinetti wrote: “Prophets and forerunners of the great Italy of today, we Futurists are happy to salute in our not yet 40-year-old Prime Minister of marvelous futurist temperament.”

In 1923, Marinetti began a rapprochement with the Fascists and presented to Mussolini his manifesto “The Artistic Rights Promoted by Italian Futurists.” Here he rejected the Bolshevik alignment of Futurists in the USSR. He pointed to the Futurist sentiments that had been expressed by Mussolini in speeches, alluding to Fascism being a “government of speed, curtailing everything that represents stagnation in the national life.”

Under Mussolini’s leadership, writes Marinetti:

Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It is now his duty to help us overhaul the artistic establishment . . . . The political revolution must sustain the artistic revolutions Marinetti was among the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals who in 1923 approved the measures taken by the regime to restore order by curtailing certain constitutional liberties amidst increasing chaos caused by both out-of-control radical Fascist squadisti and anti-Fascists.

At the 1924 Futurist Congress, the delegates upheld Marinetti’s declaration:

The Italian Futurists, more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics, say to their old comrade Benito Mussolini, free yourself from parliament with one necessary and violent stroke. Restore to Fascism and Italy the marvelous, disinterested, bold, anti-socialist, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical spirit . . .  Refuse to let monarchy suffocate the greatest, most brilliant and just Italy of tomorrow . . .  Quell the clerical opposition . . . . With a steely and dynamic aristocracy of thought.

In 1929, Marinetti accepted election to the Italian Academy, considering it important that “Futurism be represented” He was also elected secretary of the Fascist Writer’s Union and as such was the official representative for fascist culture. Futurism became a part of fascist cultural exhibitions and was utilized in the propaganda art of the regime. During the 1930s, in particular the Fascist cultural expression was undergoing a drift away from tradition and towards futurism, with the fascist emphasis on technology and modernization. Mussolini had already in 1926 defined the creation of a “fascist art” that would be based on a synthesis culturally as it was politically: “traditionalistic and at the same time modern.”

In 1943, with the Allies invading Italy, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and surrendered to the occupation forces. The fascist faithful established a last stand, in the north, named the Italian Social Republic.

With a new idealism, even former Communist and liberal leaders were drawn to the Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and championing labor against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe. Marinetti continued to be honored by the Social Republic. He died in 1944.

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samedi, 30 octobre 2010 | Lien permanent

D. H. Lawrence's Critique of Modernity

D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Modernity,
Part 1

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

d-h-lawrence.jpg1. The Genealogy of Modernity

 

The entire corpus of D. H. Lawrence’s writing is devoted to addressing the problem of life in the modern world, and his view of modernity was extraordinarily negative. Consider the following striking image Lawrence provides us with in his essay “The Novel and the Feelings”:

Supposing all horses were suddenly rendered masterless, what would they do? They would run wild. But supposing they were left still shut in their fields, paddocks, corrals, stables, what would they do? They would go insane. And that is precisely man’s predicament. He is tamed. There are no untamed to give the commands and the direction. Yet he is shut up within all his barbed wire fences. He can only go insane, degenerate.

According to Lawrence, we have created a human world for ourselves: a world of concrete and ideals, and have excluded nature. What does it mean to say that we have become “tamed”? It means that we have lost our wildness; our connection to the natural self, or the true unconscious. We have “corralled” ourselves; imprisoned ourselves in this tame, human, “ideal” world voluntarily. When Lawrence remarks that there are no “untamed to give the commands and the direction” he means that we have lost touch with the true unconscious, the untamed source within us, from which “natural man” draws his guidance. We can only go insane – in the sense that we lose our grip on reality, our orientation to the greater universe. We become degenerate through losing everything great in life, all aspiration, all spirit, and become instead Nietzsche’s “Last Man”: a creature whose concerns never rise above the level of comfort and security, and who lives from distraction to distraction, trying never to reflect upon the emptiness within him.

Though it all we reassure ourselves with the thought that “Progress” is being made. Lawrence offers the following amusing description of Modern Progress in Fantasia of the Unconscious:

“Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are implanted in a man’s mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then in a spirit of universal love–” That is the forward direction of the English-speaking race.

Much of Lawrence’s critique of modernity is simply devoted to pointing out the folly of our devotion to abstract ideals. But Lawrence was not merely a gadfly – he was a (literary) revolutionary. He believed that the existing social order was not salvageable and that it would have to be utterly and completely destroyed:

It is no use trying merely to modify present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us.

In order to fully understand Lawrence’s critique of modernity one must understand how he believes that modernity has come about. In a number of his works, Lawrence tries to work out a philosophy of history that would shed light on the mechanisms of historical change. In Movements in European History (1919) and elsewhere Lawrence develops a theory of history founded on a metaphysics derived from Empedocles. The twin principles that govern all of human life, and all human history are, according to Empedocles and Lawrence, Love and Strife. The forces are, respectively, attractive and repulsive. The first tends toward unity, the second toward disintegration or apartness. In the language Lawrence employs, the lives of human beings are governed by “sympathetic” and “voluntary” impulses, on both individual and global levels. In the modern West, due primarily to the influence of Christianity, there has been an overemphasis on the sympathetic, unitive, and “feminine” element. When an imbalance in the two forces occurs, whether in an individual psyche or in history, a swing to the other pole will occur. Thus, modern individuals have swung to the voluntary pole. Ironically, however, they have vented their aggressive willfulness through fanatical devotion to a secularized version of the ideals implicit in “sympathetic” Christianity: liberty, equality, fraternity, and, most pernicious of all, universal love.

In Apocalypse, much of which is devoted to a critique of Christian values, Lawrence refers to Lenin, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson as “evil saints.” These are men who aimed to advance the “noble” ideals of modernity regardless of the cost in human lives. He tells us elsewhere that “What has ruined Europe, but especially northern Europe, is this very ‘pure idea.’ Would to God the ‘Ideal’ had never been invented. But now it’s got its claws in us, and we must struggle free. The beast we have to fight and to kill is the Ideal. It is the worm, the foul serpent of our epoch, in whose coils we are strangled.”

The secularization of Christian ideals, and their transformation into “isms” such as socialism, communism, liberalism, and multiculturalism is a manifestation of a deeper process, however. It is the process by which the intellect comes to usurp all else in the soul. The complex and often beautiful mythology of Judaism and Christianity, which operates on a visceral level, is replaced by the abstract ideologies of men like Hegel and Marx. This simply reflects the modern shift away from “mythopoetic thought” to a form of rationalism which seeks to do away with myth and to make everything explicit and transparent by means of “the concept.” Lawrence understands this cultural shift in actual physiological terms, as a shift from a life lived in contact with the “lower centers” of the body to one which operates exclusively from the “upper centers.” (He also understands the aforementioned “sympathetic” and “voluntary” forces as grounded in human physiology.)

Lawrence states in Fantasia, “We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with understanding. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off.” Yet, underneath our intellectualism and devotion to ideals, in the deeper recesses of the body, nothing has changed. Lawrence writes, “What really torments civilized people is that they are full of feelings they know nothing about; they can’t realize them, they can’t fulfill them, they can’t live them.” These feelings may be sexual. They may be moral sentiments, such as archaic stirrings of the sense of honor. Or they may be religious: an inchoate yearning for the lost gods. Modern society gives us no one way to make sense out of many of these feelings, especially the religious ones. And others it positively condemns. Yet the feelings remain, and the feelings are very often—indeed, almost always—against the ideals. In our society, these feelings stir most strongly in children. But children are soon “put right” by an educational system that forces them, as Lawrence puts it, into “mental consciousness.” They are forced to suppress their heretical feelings, and are fed full of the Ideal.

We imagine that we live in a golden age of Progress, but Lawrence dismisses it as wholly false:

Everything is counterfeit: counterfeit complexion, counterfeit jewels, counterfeit elegance, counterfeit charm, counterfeit endearment, counterfeit passion, counterfeit culture, counterfeit love of Blake, or of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or Picasso, or the latest film-star. Counterfeit sorrows and counterfeit delights, counterfeit woes and moans, counterfeit ecstasies, and, under all, a hard, hard realization that we live by money, and money alone: and a terrible luring fear of nervous collapse, collapse.

In the eyes of modern people, however, it is very often nature itself that seems counterfeit or, at least unreal. Lawrence believes that in modernity nature is essentially seen as raw material to be made over into the products of human design. This point was famously made by Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger argues that in the modern period, as a result of the advancement and proliferation of technology, the being of the natural world has revealed itself to humankind in a manner that is vastly different from how it revealed itself to our ancestors. It has become for us the “standing reserve” (Bestand). Heidegger writes:

The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile [in the modern period] even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row], 14–15.)

In a similar vein Lawrence writes, “To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance.” In his essay “Aristocracy,” Lawrence speaks in general of how modern man has lost the connection to nature, and of how we have lost the connection to “Amon, the great ram” in particular. “To you, he is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far. But any farther, he is—well, wool.” (This promethean perspective on nature—the perspective that sees nature as “standing reserve”—is perfectly exemplified in the character of Gerald Crich in Lawrence’s greatest novel, Women in Love.)

Nature seems unreal to moderns because to them it is unfinished: it waits upon us to put our stamp upon it; to “make it into something.” Natural objects always therefore have the status of mere potentials: potentials for being made over, improved upon, or re-used or re-arranged in some fashion. At root, this is because the modern consciousness is radically future oriented. The past, for moderns, is something that has been gotten beyond, and is well lost. Only the future matters, and the future promises to carry on the march of progress; to be cleaner, faster, and smarter. Everything has its true being, therefore in the future. Everything—including ourselves—is always what it is going to be. The being of things is always promissory.

Modern people live in reaction against the past, and in anticipation of the future. What drops out is the present. Hence, the notorious inability of modern people to appreciate what is present at hand, or to recognize when enough is enough. Lawrence writes in an essay, “Why do modern people almost invariably ignore the things that are actually present to them?” He goes on to speak of an elderly tourist he encountered who left England “to find mountains, lakes, scythe-mowers, and cherry trees,” and asks “Why isn’t she content to be where she is?”

Lawrence’s answer to all of this will be unsurprising at this point. He wants us to somehow re-connect with those primal feelings and impulses that modernity requires us to suppress. The Fall of Man had nothing to do with sex; on the contrary God was on the side of sex. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they became creatures of the “upper centres”; self-aware and self-conscious. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked” (Genesis 3:6). In Lawrence’s words, the Fall did not arise “till man felt himself apart, as an apart, fragmentary, unfinished thing.” Somewhere along the way, we reached a point where we came to see ourselves as on the earth, but not of it. At one point, Lawrence refers to modern people as “parasites on the body of earth.”

He writes in “A propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,”

Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. . . . This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

But how exactly are we to go about connecting with our primal instincts, and to the earth? This is the central problem for Lawrence, and his writings explore different ideas about how to accomplish it. Of course, one approach might be purely negative or critical. It might consist in a ruthless critique of everything that is, and everything that we are, until we get to that within us which is “natural.” This is indeed one of Lawrence’s approaches, and I am exploring it in this essay. It consists, in essence, of a kind of emptying or burning away. It is the alchemical nigredo, in which some lowly stuff (in this case, us) is burned and purified; made ready for transformation into something of a higher or better sort. Lawrence’s approach to modernity is certainly destructive, but it is not purely destructive.

Lawrence reminds us of Nietzsche, going around philosophizing with a hammer. His attitude in Women in Love seems, at least on the surface, particularly Nietzschean (a point to which I shall return later). But Lawrence’s position seems to evolve over time into a version of the nostalgia Nietzsche rejected. It is a nostalgia for something like the consciousness of the “Master” type Nietzsche discussed in On The Genealogy of Morals. At times Lawrence seems clearly to yearn for a return to something like a pre-modern pagan mentality. This element in his makeup becomes more pronounced over time, culminating in his “Mexican” works, The Plumed Serpent (1926) and Mornings in Mexico (1927).

There is a major problem with such a position, however. Doesn’t our ability to understand and to critique our own history mean that we have advanced beyond the position of our ancestors? We might yearn to return to paganism, but we have lost pagan innocence. And the more we believe we have understood paganism, the further we are removed from the life of an actual pagan. In other words, Nietzsche was right. Yet the Nietzschean alternative, the literal creation of “new values” by an Overman is unnatural: it is yet another manifestation of the modern dislocation from the earth and from the body. The current values are dead all right, but Lawrence believes they were laid over top of our suppressed natural values, which must now be unearthed. But how? And how can we “go back” while preserving what we have gained in going forward, even if the going forward was into degeneration? I believe these questions get to the heart of Lawrence’s concerns about modernity, and finding an answer to it.

D. H. Lawrence’s Critique of Modernity,
Part 2

5041.jpgLawrence encountered the effects of modernity—especially the Industrial Revolution—directly in his native Midlands. He saw how if affected people, generally for the worse. Again and again he sets his stories against the backdrop of the collieries. He saw the miners become increasingly dehumanized. Working in the earth, they become cut off from it and from themselves. They lived, but they did not flourish. Lawrence’s remarks about the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, and the condition of the miners put him quite close to the thought of Marx and other socialist writers. In fact, it would not be at all unreasonable to claim Lawrence as a kind of socialist. However, as we shall see, few socialists would wish to do so!

Though The Rainbow can hardly be thought of as a novel about the Industrial Revolution, nevertheless that is its backdrop. The novel is the saga of several generations of an English family, the Brangwens, following them from the pre-industrial to the industrial age. A pastoral mood dominates throughout most of the work, and one feels a vivid sense of connection to nature and to place. Little of great significance really happens to the Brangwen family until one gets to the present day, and the story of Ursula Brangwen. Up to that point their lives are as cyclical and as repetitive as the seasons, but what we feel in reading about them is great peace, not boredom. As the narrative moves into the thick of the industrial age, it becomes populated with characters— Ursula among them—who have lost the sense of connection to the soil and to traditional culture that was the mainstay of their forebears’ existence. Ursula and her lover, Skrebensky, are lost souls, in search of some connection somewhere. Skrebensky betrays the search, and flees from Ursula. (Ursula continues it, though we must read the novel’s sequel, Women in Love, to see where it takes her.)

In his essay “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside,” Lawrence writes,

In my father’s generation, with the old wild England behind them, and the lack of education, the man was not beaten down. But in my generation, the boys I went to school with, colliers now, have all been beaten down, what with the din-din-dinning of Board Schools, books, cinemas, clergymen, the whole national and human consciousness hammering on the fact of material prosperity above all things.

How were these mean beaten down? Lawrence answers in the same essay that “the industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” Human concerns, in other words, are narrowed to economics.

It is unsurprising to see people concerned solely with making a living if they face starvation. But, for Lawrence, what is queer about modern Europeans—including the working classes—is that actual starvation is seldom a danger for any man, yet they behave as if it is. Indeed, he begins his lengthy philosophical essay “The Education of the People” with exactly this issue: “Curious that when the toothless old sphinx croaks ‘How are you going to get your living?’ our knees give way beneath us. . . . The fear of penury is very curious, in our age. In really poor ages men did not fear penury. They didn’t care. But we are abjectly terrified of it. Why?” Whoever has wits (and guts), Lawrence points out, doesn’t starve, nor does he care about starving. But today the only thing that seems to really move people is a threat to their safety and security. We are all, it seems, Nietzsche’s Last Man.

Lawrence’s analysis of what has “beaten down” modern working men places him close to Karl Marx. Clearly, Lawrence believes that modern workers exist in the condition Marx referred to as “wage slavery.” Under capitalism, it becomes less and less feasible to be self-sustaining or self-employed and workers must sell their labor to bosses, who pay the workers only a fraction of the profit produced by their hard work. Although workers are de jure free to leave their jobs, they are de facto enslaved because the same conditions of economic exploitation will be found on the next job, and the next. In his essay “Is England Still a Man’s Country?” Lawrence writes “The insuperable difficulty to modern man is economic bondage. Slavery!” Lawrence would probably also have found Marx’s theory of “alienation” under capitalism quite congenial. (That theory is to be found in the so-called “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844, which were not published until 1932.)  Lawrence would probably have agreed with Marx’s idea that capitalist relations of production alienate us from our “species being” by making it nearly impossible for us to realize ourselves and find fulfillment through work.

We know that Lawrence went through a period in his youth when he certainly thought of his himself as a socialist. In 1905, Lawrence met Alice Dax, a socialist and early feminist. Dax introduced him to a circle of socialist thinkers active in the Midlands, and also to her book collection, which included works by authors like John Ruskin, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter. Later, of course, Lawrence would make the acquaintance of an even more eminent group of “progressive” thinkers, including Bertrand Russell. On February 12, 1915 Lawrence wrote to Russell:

We must provide another standard than the pecuniary standard, to measure all daily life by. We must be free of the economic question. Economic life must be the means to actual life. . . . There must be a revolution in the state. . . . The land, the industries, the means of communication and the public amusements shall all be nationalized. Every man shall have his wage till the day of his death, whether he work or not, so long as he works when he is fit. Every woman shall have her wage till the day of her death, whether she works or not, so long as she works when she is fit—keeps her house or rears her children.

Then, and only then, shall we be able to begin living.

Throughout his career, Lawrence would again and again toy with the sort of thing he proposes here: a political solution to the problem of modernity. Ultimately, as we shall see, he came to completely reject the final assertion quoted above: that only when the right political action has been taken can we “begin living.” Ultimately, Lawrence realized that politics is not the answer; that the hope lies in the very personal quest of private individuals. (But more on this later.)

Lawrence’s “socialism” was always of the utopian variety, never the “scientific” sort advanced by Marxists. In so far as there are affinities with Marx’s thought, they are affinities—as I have already pointed out—with the early, “humanistic” Marx, not the Marx of Das Kapital. In addition, Lawrence eventually came to combine socialist ideas with a form of elitism, and an emphasis on ties to blood and soil. This, as many others have pointed out, puts him closer to fascism and national socialism than to Marx or to the left-wing progressives of Alice Dax’s circle. (However, Lawrence’s occasional flashes of Luddism and his vigorous critique of modern science distance him from both the Communists and the Nazis.)

Lawrence agrees with the Marxists in deploring the perniciousness of class warfare under capitalism. However, he rejects the Marxist (and, for that matter, national socialist) ideal of the “classless society.” For Lawrence, the problem with modern, industrial civilization is not that it has classes, but that the classes have lost the ability to relate to each other in a healthy way. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” he writes, “Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood-warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition, strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.” For Lawrence, true community depends upon shared blood ties, shared history, and closeness to the soil. In traditional, aristocratic societies relations between the classes were never so bad as they are under capitalism, for all individuals felt a kinship for one another based on an intuition of ethnic and cultural ties. But in the modern period, our awareness of these ties has been destroyed by what Lawrence calls in the same essay “individualism,” by which he means something like “atomization.” People have lost the common tie to the earth; they have forgotten their history and their folk culture. They exist in a state of apartness and mutual distrust. Industrialization and wage slavery have exacerbated this condition, pitting the new classes of bosses and workers, bourgeoisie and proletariat, against each other. The irresponsible exploitation of the earth, and of human beings, by business is only possible because these ties have been broken. This breakdown was furthered by industrialization and capitalism, but the deeper cause is what we have seen Lawrence denouncing as “idealism”: the tendency to live according to mental conceptions, ideals, and grand designs, rather than according to our “natural” and intuitive blood-consciousness, and blood-warmth.

In a late essay, “Men Must Work and Women as Well,” Lawrence writes,

Now we see the trend of our civilization, in terms of human feeing and human relation. It is, and there is no denying it, towards a greater and greater abstraction from the physical, towards a further and further physical separateness between men and women, and between individual and individual. . . . Recoil, recoil, recoil. Revulsion, revulsion, revulsion. Repulsion, repulsion, repulsion. This is the rhythm that underlies our social activity, everywhere, with regard to physical existence.

Lawrence rejects the ideal of the classless society, but he also rejects class division as it has been hitherto established in history. And he rejects traditional, hereditary aristocracy in favor of a quasi-Nietzschean “aristocracy of the spirit.” However, like much else in his social thought, Lawrence leaves it completely vague how such an aristocracy could be established and maintained. He certainly objects to the plight of the proletarians, but unlike the Marxists he does not romanticize them. In fact, Lawrence argues that in modern society virtually everyone has become “proletarian,” or proletarianized. In John Thomas and Lady Jane (the second of three versions of the novel that would become Lady Chatterley’s Lover) Connie Chatterley hears the following from the musician Archie Blood:

The proletariat is a state of mind, it’s not really a class at all. You’re proletarian when you are cold like a crab, greedy like a crab, lustful with the rickety egoism of a crab, and shambling like a crab. The people in this house are all proletarian. The Duchess of Toadstool is an arch proletarian. . . . The proletarian haves against the proletarian have-nots will destroy the human world entirely.

In other words, capitalism has turned us all into people whose lives revolve around work and money, through which we hope to gain greater security and greater buying power. When not working, we engage in various forms of mindless indulgence. It is the sort of life which (via the character of “Walter Morel”) he depicts his father living in Sons and Lovers: a day spent in the pit, followed by an evening getting drunk and stumbling home.

Essentially, the aim of communism is to do precisely what capitalism has already accomplished in a much more sinister way: to make everyone proletarian. The communists just sought to erase the distinction between the proletarian haves and have-nots. And this brings us back to Heidegger. One of Heidegger’s more notorious claims was that capitalist and communist societies were “metaphysically identical.” In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger states, “Europe lies in the pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world-character and their relation to the spirit.” Both are fundamentally materialist in their orientation: in both social systems human concerns do not rise, and are not supposed to rise, above the level of material comfort and security. Both deny the higher needs of the human spirit: communism explicitly, capitalism implicitly (and far more insidiously). In his essay “Democracy” Lawrence speaks of how in modern, democratic societies the “Average Man” is exalted above all: “Please keep out all Spiritual and Mystical needs. They have nothing to do with the average.”

Early in life, Lawrence had half-idealized the “working men” (or the miners, at least) as more in touch with their chthonic, primal feelings. Lawrence came to realize that this was an illusion. In “Democracy” he asserts that the working men are “even more grossly abstracted” from the physical. But why? Here we encounter an aspect of Lawrence’s socialism that situates him far away from Marx, but close to William Morris and the socialists of the “arts and crafts movement.” The working man is abstracted from the physical because he has been beaten down by ugliness.

Now though perhaps nobody knew it, it was ugliness which really betrayed the spirit of man, in the nineteenth century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

How does one square this thesis about the debilitating effects of ugliness with Lawrence’s claim that it is “idealism” that is the culprit here, “beating down” the working man and everyone else? The two claims are not mutually exclusive. Ugliness is a consequence of idealism: where the Ideal is all important, “aesthetic concerns” will be denigrated. This was very obviously a feature of communist societies such as the Soviet Union, where Lenin explicitly declared such concerns “momentary interests.” Westerners living in capitalist societies were always quick to point out the ugly, utilitarian quality of Soviet life—while being generally blind to it in their own countries. The typical American capitalist attitude is that unless something makes a profit it is valueless. What good is beauty, poetry, or good food—unless they can be sold on a mass scale? Since human life cannot be entirely free of these things, capitalism finds an indirect way of justifying them. The sight of beauty “relaxes” us. Reading poetry “lowers the heart rate.” Good food is a “reward for a hard day’s work.” In short, the fine and noble is not beautiful and useless at all—because it can make better, healthier, longer-lived workers of us! But the claim that the fine and noble could have any intrinsic value apart from its relation to work simply doesn’t get a hearing.

American education reflects this prejudice and students follow along like good proletarians in training, objecting to “useless” classes on literature, history, and art. All of this may make it seem like the capitalist attitude is not idealistic at all but cynically “practical.” This is not the case, however, for the ugliness and barrenness of life under capitalism is seen as part of the march of Progress. Like a disciple of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Lawrence suggests that beauty is the key to solving the “industrial problem”:

If they had made big, substantial houses, in apartments of five or six rooms, and with handsome entrances. If above all, they had encouraged song and dancing—for the miners still sang and danced—and provided handsome space for these. If only they had encouraged some form of beauty in dress, some form of beauty in interior life—furniture, decoration. If they had given prizes for the handsomest chair or table, the loveliest scarf, the most charming room that men or women could make! If only they had done this, there would never have been an industrial problem. The industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.

In the essay “Red Trousers” he playfully suggests that “If a dozen men would stroll down the Strand and Piccadilly tomorrow, wearing tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats, then the revolution against dullness which we need so much would have begun.”

Of course, such suggestions may seem highly romantic, and unrealistic, but there is nevertheless a great deal that is right about them. The essays from which the above two quotes were taken were written in the period 1928–1930. They reflect the fact that Lawrence never entirely gave up on his early “utopian socialist” sentiments. He simply became a good deal wiser about the prospects for translating them into reality. His early naïveté is perfectly reflected in the finale of The Rainbow, in which Ursula Brangwen looks down upon the ugliness of the mining countryside, only to see a rainbow rising above it: “She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.” The First World War destroyed Lawrence’s naïve hopes that the modern world might be cleansed and redeemed, at least through some kind of social reform. His next novel, Women in Love, would be a complete repudiation of the optimism with which The Rainbow ends. My next essay will be devoted to an analysis of Women in Love as anti-modern novel.

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dimanche, 16 janvier 2011 | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1)

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

1. Love and Strife

Lawrence.jpgIn a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Lawrence’s views about relations between the sexes, and about sex differences are perhaps his most controversial – and they have frequently been misrepresented. But before we delve into those views, let us ask why it should be the case that establishing a new relation between men and women is “the problem of to-day.” The reason is fairly obvious. The species divides itself into male and female, reproduces itself thereby, and the overwhelming majority of human beings seek their fulfillment in a relationship to the opposite sex. If relations between the sexes have somehow been crippled—as Lawrence believes they have been—then this is a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine a greater, more pressing problem.

Lawrence came to relations with women bearing serious doubts about his own manhood, and with the conviction that his nature was fundamentally androgynous. Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.” Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed.” Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”

Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means.

Lawrence’s view of the difference between the sexes can be fruitfully compared to the Chinese theory of yin and yang.  These concepts are of great antiquity, but the way in which they are generally understood today is the product of an ambitious intellectual synthesis that took place under the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.–9 A.D.). According to this philosophy, the universe is shot through with an ultimate principle or power known as the Tao. However, the Tao divides itself into two opposing principles, yin and yang. These oppose yet complement each other. Yang manifests itself in maleness, hardness, harshness, dominance, heat, light, and the sun, amongst other things. Yin manifests itself in femaleness, softness, gentleness, yielding, cold, darkness, the moon, etc.

Contrary to the impression these lists might give, however, yang is not regarded as “superior” to yin; hardness is not superior to softness, nor is dominance superior to yielding. Each requires the other and cannot exist without the other. In certain situations a yang approach or condition is to be preferred, in others a yin approach. On occasion, yang may predominate to the point where it becomes harmful, and it must be counterbalanced by yin, or vice versa. (These principles are of central importance, for example, in traditional Chinese medicine.) The Tao Te Ching, a work written by a man chiefly for men extols the virtues of yin, and continually advises one to choose yin ways over yang. Lao-Tzu tells us over and over that it is “best to be like water,” that “those who control, fail. Those who grasp, lose,” and that “soft and weak overcome stiff and strong.”

Like the Taoists, Lawrence regards maleness and femaleness as opposed, yet complementary. It is not the case that the male, or the male way of being, is superior to the female, or vice versa. In a sense the sexes are equal, yet equality does not mean sameness. The error of male chauvinism is in thinking that one way, the male way, is superior; that dominance and hardness are just “obviously” superior to their opposites.

Yet the same error is committed by some who call themselves feminists. Tacitly, they assume that the male or yang characteristics are superior, and enjoin women to seek fulfillment in life through cultivating those traits in themselves. To those who might wonder whether such a program is possible, to say nothing of desirable, the theory of the “social construction of gender” is today being offered as support. According to this view, the only inherent differences between men and women are anatomical, and all of the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics attributed to the sexes throughout history have actually been the product of culture and environment. (And so “yin and yang,” according to this view, is really a rather naïve philosophy which confuses nurture with nature.) Clearly, Lawrence would reject this theory. In doing so, he is on very solid ground.

It would, of course, be foolish not to recognize that some “masculine” and “feminine” traits are culturally conditioned. An obvious example would be the prevailing view in American culture that a truly “masculine” man is unable, without the help of women or gay men, to color-coordinate his wardrobe. However, when one sees certain traits in men and women displaying themselves consistently in all cultures and throughout all of human history it makes sense to speak of masculine and feminine natures. It is plausible to argue that a trait is culturally conditioned only if it shows up in some cultures but not in others. Unfortunately, the “social construction of gender” thesis has achieved the status of a dogma in academic circles. And, in truth, ultimately it has to be asserted as dogma since believing in it requires that we ignore the evidence of human history, profound philosophies such as Taoism, and most of the scientific research into sex differences that has taken place over the last one hundred years.

I said earlier that Lawrence believes men and women to be “metaphysically different,” and in his essay “A Study of Thomas Hardy” he does indeed write as if he believes they actually see the world with a different metaphysics in mind:

It were a male conception to see God with a manifold Being, even though He be One God. For man is ever keenly aware of the multiplicity of things, and their diversity. But woman, issuing from the other end of infinity, coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation, is obsessed by the oneness of things, the One Being, undifferentiated. Man, on the other hand, coming forth as the desire to single out one thing from another, to reduce each thing to its intrinsic self by process of elimination, cannot but be possessed by the infinite diversity and contrariety in life, by a passionate sense of isolation, and a poignant yearning to be at one.

So, men seek or are preoccupied with multiplicity, and women with unity. What are we to make of such a bizarre claim? First of all, it seems to run counter to the Greek tradition, especially that of the Pythagoreans, which tended to identify the One with the masculine, and the Many with the feminine. However, if one looks to Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher Lawrence was particularly keen on, one finds a different story. Empedocles posits two fundamental forces which are responsible for all change in the universe: Love and Strife. Love, at the purely physical level, is a force of attraction. It draws things together, and without the intervention of Strife it would result in a monistic universe in which only one being existed. Strife breaks up and divides. It is a force of repulsion and separation. Now, Empedocles seems to identify Love with Aphrodite, and we may infer, though he does not say so, that Strife is Ares. In other words, he identifies his two forces with the archetypal female and male. This can offer us a clue as to what Lawrence is up to.

In Lawrence’s view, it is the female who wants to draw things, especially people, together. It is the female who yearns to heal divisions, to break down barriers. “Coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation” she seeks to overcome separateness through feeling, primarily through love. In the family situation, it is the female who tries to unite and overcome discord through love, whereas it is the male, typically, who frustrates this through the insistence on rules and distinctions. The ideal of universal love and an end to strife and division is fundamentally feminine—one which men, throughout history, have continually frustrated. It is characteristic of men to make war, and characteristic of women, no matter what cause or principle is involved, to object and to call for peace and unity.

Now the male, as Lawrence puts it, suffers from a sense of isolation, and a “yearning to be one.” He yearns for oneness, in fact, as the male yearns for the female. Yet his entire being disposes him to see the world in terms of its distinctness, and, indeed, to make a world rife with distinctions. Lawrence implies that polytheism is a “male” religion, and monotheism a “female” one. It is easy to see the logic involved in this. Polytheism sees the divine being that permeates the world as many because the world is itself many. Further, societies with polytheistic religions have always been keenly aware of ethnic and social differences, differences within the society (as in the Indian caste system), and between societies. Monotheism, on the other hand, tends toward universalism. Christianity especially, however it has actually been practiced, declares all men equal in the sight of God and calls for peace and unity in the world. (Lawrence, as we shall see later on, does indeed regard Christianity as a “feminine” religion, and blames it, in part, for feminizing Western men.)

This fundamental, metaphysical difference has the consequence that men and women do, in a real sense, live in different worlds. But perhaps such a formulation reflects a male bias towards differentiation. It is equally correct to say, in a more “feminine” formulation, that it is the same world seen in two, complementary ways. Indeed, it may be the case that it is difficult to see, from a male perspective, how the two sexes and their different ways of thinking and perceiving can achieve a rapprochement. Lawrence believes, of course, that they can live together, and that their opposite tendencies can be harmonized. In this way he is like Heraclitus, Lawrence’s favorite pre-Socratic, when he says “what is opposed brings together; the finest harmony is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.” Heraclitus also tells us that “They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it [the Logos] agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.” In order to make a lyre or a bow, the two opposite ends of a piece of wood must be bent towards each other, never meeting, but held in tension. Their tension and opposition makes possible beautiful music, in the case of the lyre, and the propulsion of an arrow, in the case of the bow. Both involve a harmony through opposition.

In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.

womeninlove.jpgIn Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence tells us “The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.” Lawrence believes that men yearn for purposive, creative activity, which involves moving away from the source. However, the energy and inspiration for purposive activity is drawn from the source, and so there is a complementary movement back towards it.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence describes how Tom Brangwen, besotted with his wife, seems to lose himself in a sensual obsession with her, and with knowing her sexually. But gradually,

Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.

Sex is one means of contacting the source. Men contact the source through women. This does not mean, of course, that blood-consciousness is in women but not in men. Rather, it means that in most men the blood-consciousness in them is “activated” primarily through their relationship to women. Second, in women blood-consciousness is more dominant than it is in men. Women are more intuitive than men; they operate more on the basis of feeling than intellect. It should not be necessary to point out that whereas such an observation might, in another author, be taken as a denigration of women, in Lawrence it is actually high praise. Women are also much more in tune with their bodies and bodily cycles than men are. Men tend to see their bodies as adversaries that must be whipped into shape.

When Lawrence continually tells us that we must find a way to reawaken the blood-consciousness in us, he is writing primarily for men. Women are already there—or, at least, they can get there with less effort. There is an old adage: “Women are, but men must become.” To be feminine is a constant state that a woman has as her birthright. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something men must achieve and prove. Rousseau in Emile states “The male is male only at certain moments, the female is female all of her life, or at least all her youth.” We exhort boys to “be a man,” but never does one hear girls told to “be a woman.” One can compliment a man simply by saying “he’s a man,” whereas “she’s a woman” seems mere statement of fact. The psychological difference between masculinity and femininity mirrors the biological fact that all fetuses begin as female; something must happen to them in order to make them male. It also articulates what is behind the strange conviction many men have had, including many great poets and artists, that woman is somehow the keeper of life’s mysteries; the one closest to the well-spring of nature.

In “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence states that “in a man’s life, the female is the swivel and centre on which he turns closely, producing his movement.” Goethe tells us “Das ewig Weiblich zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal Feminine draws us onwards”). The female, the male’s source of the source, stands at the center of his life. The woman as personification of the life mystery entices him to come together with her, and through their coupling the life mystery perpetuates itself. But he is not, ultimately, satisfied by this coupling. He goes forth into the world, his body renewed by his contact with the woman, but full of desire to know this mystery more adequately, and to be its vehicle through creative expression.

Without a woman, a man feels unmoored and ungrounded, for without a woman he has no center in his life. A man—a heterosexual man—can never feel fulfilled and can never reach his full potential without a woman to whom he can turn. As to homosexual men, it is a well-known fact that many cultivate in themselves characteristics that have been traditionally usually associated with woman: refined taste in clothing and decoration, cooking, gardening, etc. What these characteristics have in common is connectedness to the pleasures of the moment, and to the rhythms and necessities of life. Men are normally purpose-driven and future-oriented. They tend to overlook those aspects of life that please, but lack any greater purpose other than pleasing. They tend, therefore, to be somewhat insensitive to their surroundings, to color, to texture, to odor, to taste. They tend, in short, to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being. Heterosexual men look to women to ground them, and to provide these ingredients to life—ingredients which, in truth, make life livable. Homosexual men must make a woman within themselves, in order to be grounded. (This does not mean, however, that they must become effeminate – see my review essay of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia for more details.)

Homosexual men are, of course, the exception not the rule. Lawrence writes, of the typical man, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” And what of the woman? What does she desire? Lawrence tells us that “the vital desire of every woman is that she shall be clasped as axle to the hub of the man, that his motion shall portray her motionlessness, convey her static being into movement, complete and radiating out into infinity, starting from her stable eternality, and reaching eternity again, after having covered the whole of time.” Man is the “doer,” the actor, whereas woman need do nothing. Just by being woman she becomes the center of a man’s universe.

The dark side of this, in Lawrence’s view, is a tendency in women towards possessiveness, and towards wanting to make themselves not just the center of a man’s life but his sole concern. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s describes at length Rupert Birkin’s process of wrestling with this aspect of femininity:

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

Birkin sees these qualities in Ursula, with whom he is in love. “She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.” He feels she wants, in a way, to worship him, but “to worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.”

Woman’s possessiveness is understandable given that the man is necessary to her well-being: she is only happy if she is center to the orbit and activity of some man. Again, for Lawrence, such a claim does not denigrate women, for he has already as much as said that a man is nothing without a woman. Nevertheless, some will see in this view of men and woman a sexism that places the man above the woman. From Lawrence’s perspective, this is illusory. It is true that the man is “doer,” but his perpetual need to act and to do stands in stark contrast to the woman, who need do nothing in order be who she is. It is true, further, that men’s ambition has given them power in the world, but it is a power that is nothing compared to that of the woman, who exercises her power without having to do anything. She reigns, without ruling. The man does what he does, but must return to the woman, and is “like a loose speck blown at random without her” – and he knows this. Much of misogyny may have to do with this. From the man’s perspective, the woman is all-powerful, and the source of her power a mystery.

Many modern feminists, however, conceive of power in an entirely male way, as the active power of doing. Lawrence recognized that in trying to cultivate this male power within themselves, women do not rise in the estimation of most men. Instead they are diminished, for men’s respect for and fascination with women springs entirely from the fact that unlike themselves women do not have to chase after an ideal of who they ought to be; they do not have to get caught up in the rat race in order to respect themselves. They can simply be; they can live, and take joy just in living.

One can make a rough distinction between two types of feminism. The most familiar type is what one might call the “woman on the street feminism,” which one encounters from average, working women, and which they imbibe from television, films, and magazines. This feminism essentially has as its aim claiming for women all that which formerly had been the province of men—including not only traditionally male jobs, but even male ways of speaking, moving, dressing, bonding, exercising, and displaying sexual interest. Ironically, this form of feminism is at root a form of masculinism, which makes traditionally masculine traits the hallmarks of the “liberated” or self-actualized human being.

The other type of feminism is usually to be found only in academia, though not all academic feminists subscribe to it. It insists that women have their own ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Feminist philosophers have written of woman’s “ways of knowing” as distinct from men’s, and have even put forward the idea that women approach ethical decision-making in a markedly different way. It is this form of feminism to which Lawrence is closest. Lawrence’s writings are concerned with liberating both men and women from the tyranny of a modern civilization which cuts them off from their true natures. Liberation for modern women cannot mean becoming like modern men, for modern men are living in a condition of spiritual (as well as wage) slavery. In an essay on feminism, Wendell Berry writes

It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of [the comic strip character] Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling—even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid—an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? . . . How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? [Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 69–70.]

I will return to this issue later.

Having now characterized, in broad strokes, Lawrence’s views on the differences between men and woman, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of each.

2. The Nature of Man

As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the man makes the woman, or his relationship to her, the purpose of his life. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child, the great centre of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” This is because Lawrence believes that true satisfaction for men can come only from some form of creative, purposive activity outside the family.

women1.jpgHaving a woman is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for male happiness. In addition to a woman, he must have a purpose. Women, on the other hand, do not require a purpose beyond the home and the family in order to be happy. This is another of those claims that will rankle some, so let us consider two important points about what Lawrence has said. First, he is speaking of what he believes the typical woman is like, just as he is speaking of the typical man. There are at least a few exceptions to just about every generalization. Second, we must ask an absolutely crucial question of those who regard such claims as demeaning women: why is being occupied with home and family lesser than having a purpose (e.g., a career) outside the home? The argument could be made—and I think Lawrence would be sympathetic to this—that the traditional female role of making a home and raising children is just as important and possibly more important than the male activities pursued outside the home. Again, much of contemporary feminism sees things from a typically male point of view, and denigrates women who choose motherhood rather than one of the many meaningless, ulcer-producing careers that have long been the province of men.

Lawrence writes, “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers.” Lawrence’s male bias creeps in here a bit, as he romanticizes the “dauntless” male soul. Men and women always believe, in their heart of hearts, that their ways are superior. Nevertheless, Lawrence is not here relegating women to an inferior position. Half of life is spent in the evening and night. Day belongs to the man, night to the woman. It is a division of labor. Lawrence is drawing here, as he frequently does, on traditional mythological themes: the man is solar, the woman lunar.

Lawrence characterizes the man’s pioneering activity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.” In other words, the man’s primary purpose is not having or doing any of the “practical” things that a wife and a family require. And when he acts on a larger scale—Lawrence gives building the Panama Canal as an example—it is not with the end in mind of making a world in which wives and babes can be more comfortable and secure (“a world for you, dear”). He seeks to make his mark on the world; to bring something glorious into existence. And so men create culture: games, religions, rituals, dances, artworks, poetry, music, and philosophy. Wars are fought, ultimately, for the same reason. It is probably true, as is often asserted, that every war has some kind of economic motivation. However, it is probably also true to assert that in the case of just about every actual war there was another, more cost-effective alternative. Men make war for the same reason they climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, race cars, and run with the bulls: for the challenge, and the fame and glory and exhilaration that goes with meeting the challenge. It is an aspect of male psychology that most women find baffling, and even contemptible.

Now, curiously, Lawrence refers to this “impractical,” purposive motive of the male as an “essentially religious or creative motive.” What can he mean by this? Specifically, why does he characterize it as a religious motive?

It is religious because it involves the pursuit of something that is beyond the ordinary and the familiar. It is a leap into the unknown. The man has to follow what Lawrence frequently calls the “Holy Ghost” within himself and to try to make something within the world. He yearns always for the yet-to-be, the yet-to-be-realized, and always has his eye on the future, on what is in process of coming to be. Yet there seems to be, at least on the surface, a strange inconsistency in Lawrence’s characterization of the man’s motive as religious. After all, for Lawrence the life mystery, the source of being is religious object—and women are closer to this source. Man is entranced by woman, and with her he helps to propagate this power in the world through sex, but his sense of “purpose” causes him to move away from the source. So why isn’t it the woman whose “motives” are religious, and the man who is, in effect, irreligious?

The answer is that religion is not being at the source: it is directedness toward the source. Religion is possible only because of a lack or an absence in the human soul. Religion is ultimately a desire to put oneself at-one with the source. But this is possible only if one is not, originally or most of the time, at one with it. In a way, the woman is not fundamentally religious because she is the goddess, the source herself. The sexual longing of the man for the woman, and his utter inability ever to fully satisfy his desire and to resolve the mystery that is woman, are a kind of small-scale allegory for man’s large-scale, religious relationship to the source of being itself. He is, as I have said, renewed by his relations with women and, for a time, satisfied. But then he goes forth into the world with a desire for something, something. He creates, and when he does he is acting to exalt the life mystery (religion and art), to understand it (philosophy and science), or to further it (invention and production).

Lawrence speaks of how a man must put his wife “under the spell of his fulfilled decision.” Woman, who rules over the night, draws man to her and they become one through sex. Man, who rules the day, draws woman into his purpose, his aim in life, and through this they become one in another fashion. The man’s purpose does not become the woman’s purpose. He pursues this alone. But if the woman simply believes in him and what he aims to do, she becomes a tremendous source of support for the man, and she gives herself a reason for being. The man needs the woman as center, as hub of his life, and the woman needs to play this role for some man. Without a mate, though a man may set all sorts of purposes before him, ultimately they seem meaningless. He feels a sense of hollow emptiness, and drifts into despair. He lets his appearance go, and lives in squalor. He may become an alcoholic and a misogynist. He dies much sooner than his married friends, often by his own hand. As to the woman, without a man who has set himself some purpose that she can believe in, she assumes the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy activity in the world. But as she pursues this, she feels increasingly bitter and hard, and a terrific rage begins to seethe beneath her placid surface. She becomes a troublemaker and a prude. Increasingly angry at men, she makes a virtue of necessity and declares herself emancipated from them. She collects pets.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence writes:

As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can’t help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can’t bear to see anything physically hurt. But let a woman loose from the bounds and restraints of man’s fierce belief, in his gods and in himself, and she becomes a gentle devil.

If a woman is to be the hub in the life a man, and derive satisfaction from that, everything depends on the spirit of the man. A few lines later in the same text Lawrence states, “Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely: unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.” In order for the woman to believe in a man, the man must believe in himself and his purpose. If he is filled with self-doubt, the woman will doubt him. If he lacks the strength to command himself, he cannot command her respect and devotion. And the trouble with modern men is that they are filled with self-doubt and lack the courage of their convictions.

Lawrence, following Nietzsche, in part blames Christianity for weakening modern, Western men. Men are potent—sexually and otherwise—to the extent they are in tune with the life force. But Christianity has “spiritualized” men. It has filled their heads with hatred of the body, and of strength, instinct, and vitality. It has infected them with what Lawrence calls the “love ideal,” which demands, counter to every natural impulse, that men love everyone and regard everyone as their equal.

Frequently in his fiction Lawrence depicts relationships in which the woman has turned against the man because he is, in effect, spiritually emasculated. The most dramatic and symbolically obvious example of this is the relationship of Clifford and Connie  in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford returns from the First World War paralyzed from the waist down. But like the malady of the Grail King in Wolfram’s Parzival, this is only (literarily speaking) an outward, physical expression of an inward, psychic emasculation. Clifford is far too sensible a man to allow himself to be overcome by any great passion, so the loss of his sexual powers is not so dear. He has a keen, cynical wit and believes that he has seen through passion and found it not as great a thing as poets say that it is. It is his spiritual condition that drives Connie away from him, not so much his physical one. And so she wanders into the game preserve on their estate (representing the small space of “wildness” that still can rise up within civilization) and into the arms of Mellors, the gamekeeper. Their subsequent relationship becomes a hot, corporeal refutation of Clifford’s philosophy.

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich, the industrial magnate, is destroyed by Gudrun essentially because he does not believe in himself. Outwardly, he is “the God of the machine.” But his mastery of the material world is meaningless busywork, and he knows it. Gudrun is drawn to him because of this outward appearance of power, but when she finds that it is an illusion she hates him, and ultimately drives him to his death. For Lawrence, this is an allegory of the modern relationship between the sexes. Men today are masters of the material universe as they have never been before, but inside they are anxious and empty. The reason is that these “materialists” are profoundly afraid of and hostile to matter and nature, especially their own. Their intellect and “will to power” has cut them off from the life force and they are, in their deepest selves, impotent. The women know this, and scorn them.

In The Rainbow, Winifred Inger is Ursula’s teacher (with whom she has a brief affair), and an early feminist. She tells Ursula at one point,

The men will do no more,–they have lost the capacity for doing. . . .  They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea,” so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.”

It is important to understand here that the issue is not one of power. Lawrence’s point not that men must dominate or control their wives. In fact, in a late essay entitled “Matriarchy” (originally published as “If Women Were Supreme”) Lawrence actually advocates rule by women, at least in the home, because he believes it would liberate men. He assumes the truth of the claim—now in disrepute—that early man had lived in matriarchal societies and writes, “the men seem to have been lively sorts, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the woman did the drudgery and minded the brats. . . . A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As to the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers.” The man, in such a situation, is not the slave of the woman because the man is “first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe.” The man’s real life is not in the household, but in creative activity, and religious activity:

The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then also he is away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountains, or he works in the fields.

Men, Lawrence tells us, have social and religious needs which can only be satisfied apart from women. The disaster of modern marriage is that men not only think they have to rule the roost, but they accept the woman’s insistence that he have no needs or desires that cannot be satisfied through his relationship to her. He becomes master of his household, and slave to it at the same time:

Now [man’s] activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, and the reborn of woman. . . . Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings—nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman.

Ironically, in accepting such a situation without a fight, he only earns the woman’s contempt: “Almost invariably a [modern] married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt, of her husband, or a pity which is near to contempt. Particularly if he is a good husband, a true modern.”

3. The Nature of Woman

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” But what is meant by “feeling” here? Lawrence is referring again to his belief that women live, to a greater extent than men, from the primal self. In the case of most men today, “mind-consciousness” and reason are dominant—to the point where they are frequently detached from “blood-consciousness” and feeling.

In describing the nature of woman Lawrence once again draws on perennial symbols: “Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.” The sun represents man, and the moon woman. Day belongs to him, and night to her. However, another set of mythic images associates the earth with woman and the sky with man. The “pull” in women is towards the earth, and this means several things. First, the earth is the source of chthonic powers, and so, as poetic metaphor, it represents the primal, pre-mental, animal aspect in human beings. In a literal sense, however, Lawrence believes that women are more in tune than men with chthonic powers: with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of seasons. Further, the “downward flow” refers to Lawrence’s belief that the lower “centres” of the body are, in a sense, more primitive, more instinctual than the upper, and that women tend to live and act from these centers more than men do. Lawrence writes, “Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. . . . The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet.”

Finally, to be “polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth” means to have one’s life, one’s vital being fixed in reference to a central point. If Lawrence intends us to assume that man is polarized upwards then we may ask, toward what? If woman is oriented towards the center of the earth, then–following the logic of the mythic categories–is man oriented toward the center of the sky? But the sky has no center. Man is less fixed than woman; he is a wanderer. He is a hunter, a seeker, a pioneer, an adventurer. Woman, on the other hand, lives from the axis of the world. Mircea Eliade writes that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World.” Woman is at the center. Man begins there, then goes off. He returns again and again, the phallic power in him rising in response to the chthonic power of the woman. And his religious response is an ongoing effort to bring his daytime self into line with the life force he experiences when in the arms of the woman.

Woman, Lawrence tells us, “is a flow, a river of life,” and this flow is fundamentally different from the man’s river. However, “The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another: sweetheart, mistress, wife, mother.” The mind of the male is built to analyze and categorize. But the nature of woman, like the nature of nature itself, defies categorization. Even before Bacon, man’s response to nature was to force it to yield up its secrets, to bend it to the human will, or to see it only within the narrow parameters of whatever theory was fashionable at the moment. The male mind attempts to do this to woman as well–and the woman, to a great extent, cooperates. She fits herself into the roles expected of her by authority figures, whether it is dutiful daughter-sister-wife-mother, or dutiful feminist and career-woman.

Lawrence writes, “The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done.” Two opposing wills exist in women, Lawrence believes: a will to conform or to submit, and a will to reject all boundaries and be free. In Women in Love, Birkin compares women to horses:

“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it. . . . And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

Ursula, who is present at this exchange, laughs and responds “Then I’m a bolter.” The trouble is that she is not.

Lawrence’s fiction is filled with vivid portrayals of women (arguably much more vivid and well-drawn than his portrayals of men). The central characters in several of his novels are women (The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). All of Lawrence’s major female characters exhibit these two wills, but frequently he presents pairs of women each of whom represents one of the wills. This is the case in Women in Love. Ultimately, in Ursula’s character the will to surrender emerges as dominant. In her sister Gudrun the will to be free and wild dominates, with tragic results. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley exhibits the will to surrender, and her sister Hilda the will to be free. The two lesbians in Lawrence’s novella The Fox are cut from the same cloth. Similar pairs of women also crop up in Lawrence’s short stories. In each case, one woman learns the joys of submitting, not to a man but to the earth, to nature, to the life mystery within her. The man is a means to this, however. The best example of this in Lawrence’s fiction is probably Connie Chatterley’s journey to awakening. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence has Connie speak of the significance of her lover and of his penis: “I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was penis gave it me.” As to the other woman in Lawrence’s fiction, she tends to be horrified by the primal self in her, and its call to surrender. She lives from the ego. She rages against anything in her nature that is unchosen, and against anything else that would hem her in, especially any man. She views herself as “realistic” and hardheaded, but the general impression she gives is of being hardhearted and sterile.

In his portrayals of the latter type of woman, Lawrence is partly depicting what he believes to be a perennial aspect of the female character, and partly depicting what he regards as the quintessential “modern” woman. It is in the nature of woman to counterbalance the will to submit with an opposing will that “bolts,” and kicks against all that which limits her, including her own nature. Lawrence believes that modern womanhood and all the problems of women today arise from the over-development of that will to freedom.

A “will to freedom” sounds like a good thing, so it is important to realize that essentially what Lawrence means by this is a negative will which tries either to control, or to destroy all that which it cannot control. Lawrence’s critique of modernity is a major topic in itself, but suffice it say that he believes that in the modern period a disavowal of the primal self takes place on a mass, cultural scale. The seeds of this disavowal were sown by Christianity, and reaped by modern scientism, which becomes the avowed enemy of the religion that helped foster it. Individuals live their lives from the standpoint of ego and mental-consciousness, and distrust the blood-consciousness. The negative will in women seizes upon reason and ego-dominance as a means to free herself from the influence of her dark, chthonic self, and from the influence of the men that this dark, chthonic self draws her to. The will to negate, using the mind as its tool, thus becomes the path to “liberation.”

Lawrence writes in Apocalypse:

Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself.

And in an essay he writes, “Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is asserted by most pundits today, when they speak of the progress made by woman in the modern era. Why does Lawrence believe that woman is now so unfree? The answer is implied in the quotation from Apocalypse: she is not allowed to be herself.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence tells us

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

aaron'srod.jpgWhat Lawrence says here is applicable to both men and women. “To be oneself” in the true sense means to answer to the call of the deepest self. We can only achieve our “fullness of being” if we do so. The mind invents all manner of goals and projects and ideals to be pursued, but ultimately all that we do produces only frustration and emptiness if we act in a way that does not fundamentally satisfy the needs of our deepest, pre-mental, bodily nature.

Lawrence writes further in Apocalypse: “The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant,’ she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilization higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon.” Earlier in the same text, Lawrence tells us that “The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life-maker, vivifier.” In short, the “green dragon” represents the life force, the source of all, the Pan power. Lawrence is saying that modern woman, in search of something “significant” to do with her life, falls in with all the corrupt (largely, money-driven) pursuits that have brought men nothing but ulcers, emptiness, and early death. “All our present life-forms are evil,” he writes. “But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realize that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.” Like men, she loses touch with the natural both within herself and in the world surrounding her. Lawrence’s dragon symbolizes both of these: primal nature as such, and the primal nature within me. It is this dragon which Lawrence seeks to awake in himself, and in his readers. The tragedy of modern woman is that she has renounced the dragon, whereas she would be better off being devoured by it.

In John Thomas and Lady Jane Lawrence also links the ideal of fulfilled womanhood to the dragon. Following Connie Chatterley’s musings on the meaning of the phallus (which I quoted earlier), Lawrence writes:

The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing—the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety.

Lire la suite

vendredi, 17 décembre 2010 | Lien permanent | Commentaires (1)

La révolution conservatrice en Allemagne (1918-1932)

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SYNERGIES EUROPÉENNES - Novembre 1989

 

La "Révolution Conservatrice" en Allemagne (1918-1932)

 

A propos de la réédition tant attendue du célèbre manuel d'Armin Mohler

 

par Robert STEUCKERS

 

L'ouvrage d'Armin Mohler sur la "Konservative Revolution" (KR) a été si souvent cité, qu'il est de-venu, dans l'espace linguistique francophone, chez ceux qui cultivent une sorte d'adhésion affective aux idées vitalistes allemandes déri-vées de Nietzsche, une sorte de mythe, de ré-férence mythique très mal connue mais souvent évoquée. Cette année, une réédition a enfin vu le jour, flanquée d'un volume complémen-taire où sont consignés les commentaires de l'auteur sur l'état actuel de la recherche, sur les nou-veaux ou-vrages d'approfondissement et surtout sur les re-cherches de Sternhell (1).

 

Comment se présente-t-il, finalement, cet ou-vrage de base, ce manuel si fondamental? Il se compose d'abord d'un texte d'initiation, com-mençant à la page 3 de l'ouvrage et s'achevant à la page 169; ensuite d'une bibliographie ex-haustive, recensant tous les ouvrages des au-teurs cités et tous les ouvrages pa-noramiques sur la KR: elle débute à la page 173 pour se ter-miner à la page 483. Suivent alors les annexes, avec la liste des abréviations utilisées pour les lieux d'édition et les maisons d'édition, puis les registres des personnes, des périodiques et des organisations.

 

Un ouvrage destiné à la recherche

 

L'ouvrage est donc de prime abord destiné à la re-cherche. Mais comme la thématique englobe des idées, des leitmotive, des affirmations poli-tiques qui ont enthousiasmé de larges strates de l'intelligentsia alle-mande voire une partie des masses, il est évident qu'aujourd'hui encore elle enregistrera des retentis-sements divers en de-hors des cénacles académiques. A Bruxelles, à Genève, à Paris ou à Québec, il n'y a pas que des professeurs qui lisent Ernst Jünger ou Tho-mas Mann... La recension qui suit s'adressera dès lors essentiellement à ce public extra-aca-démique et se con-centrera sur la première partie de l'ouvrage, le texte d'initiation, avec ses défini-tions de concepts, sa clas-sification des diverses strates du phénomène que fut la KR. Mohler, dans ces chapitres d'une densité inouïe, définit très méticuleusement des mouvements politico-idéologiques aussi marginaux que fascinants: les "trots-kystes du national-socialisme", la "Deutsche Be-wegung" (DB), le national-bolché-visme, le "Troi-sième Front" (Dritte Front,  en abrégé DF), les Völkischen,  les Jungkonser-vativen,  les nationaux-révolutionnaires, les Bündischen,  etc. ainsi que des concepts comme Weltanschauung, nihilisme, Umschlag,  "Grand Midi", réalisme héroïque, etc.

 

"Konservative Revolution" et national-socialisme

 

Le premier souci de Mohler, c'est de distinguer la KR du national-socialisme. Pour la tradition antifasciste, souvent imprégnée des démon-strations du marxisme vulgaire, le national-so-cialisme est la continuation politique de la KR. De fait, le national-socialisme a affirmé pour-suivre dans les faits ce que la KR (ou la "Deutsche Bewegung") avait esquissé en esprit. Mais nonobstant cette revendication nationale-socialiste, on est bien obligé de constater, avec Mohler, que la KR d'avant 1933 recelait bien d'autres possibles. Le national-socialisme a constitué un grand mouvement de masse, impres-sionnant dans ses dimensions et affublé de toutes les lourdeurs propres aux appareils de ce type. Face à lui, foisonnaient des petits cercles où l'esprit s'épanouissait indépendamment des vicis-situdes politiques du temps. Ces cénacles d'intel-lec-tuels n'eurent que peu d'influence sur les masses. Le grand parti, en revanche, écrit Mohler, "gardait les masses sous son égide par le biais des liens orga-ni-sationnels et d'une doctrine adaptée à la moyenne et limitée à des slogans; il n'offrait aux têtes supérieures que peu d'espace et seulement dans la mesure où elles voulaient bien participer au travail d'enré-gimentement des masses et limitaient l'exercice de leurs facultés intellectuelles à un quelconque petit domaine ésotérique" (p.4).

 

Peu d'intellectuels se satisferont de ce rôle de "garde-chiourme de luxe" et préfèreront rester dans cette cha-leur du nid qu'offraient leurs petits cénacles élitaires, où, pensaient-ils, l'"idée vraie" était conservée intacte, tandis que les partis de masse la caricaturaient et la tra-his-saient. Ce réflexe déclencha une cascade de rup-tures, de sécessions, d'excommunications, de conju-ra-tions avec des éléments exclus du parti, si bien que plus aucune équation entre la NSDAP et la KR ne peut honnêtement être posée. Bon nombre de figures de la KR de-vinrent ainsi les "trotskystes du national-so-cialisme", les hérétiques de la "Deutsche Be-wegung", qui seront poursuivis par le régime ou opteront pour l'"émigration intérieure" ou s'insinueront dans cer-taines instances de l'Etat car le degré de la mise au pas totalitaire fut nettement moindre en Allemagne qu'en Union Soviétique. Des représentants éminents de la KR, comme Hans Grimm, Oswald Spengler et Ernst Jünger purent compter sur l'appui de la Reichswehr, des cercles diplomatiques "vieux-conservateurs" ou de cénacles liés à l'industrie. Ne choisissent l'émi-gration que les figures de proue des groupes sociaux-révolutionnaires (Ot-to Strasser, Paetel, Ebeling) ou certains natio-naux-socialistes dissidents comme Rausch-ning. La plupart restent toutefois en Alle-magne, en es-pérant que surviendra une "seconde ré-volution" entièrement conforme à l'"Idée". D'autres se taisent définitivement (Blüher, Hielscher), se ré-fugient dans des préoccupations totalement a-politi-ques ou dans la poésie (Winnig) ou se tournent vers la phi-losophie religieuse (Esch-mann). Très rares seront ceux qui passeront carrément au national-socialisme comme Bäum-ler, spécialiste de Bachofen.

 

La thèse qui cherche à prouver la "culpabilité an-ticipative" de la KR ne tient pas. En effet, les idées de la KR se retrouvent, sous des formes chaque fois spé-cifiquement nationales, dans tous les pays d'Eu-rope depuis la moitié du XIXième siècle. Si l'on re-trouve des traces de ces idées dans le national-so-cia-lisme allemand, celui-ci, comme nous venons de le voir, n'est qu'une manifestation très partielle et in-com-plète de la KR, et n'a été qu'une tentative parmi des dizaines d'autres possibles. Raisonner en termes de causalité (diabolique) constitue donc, expli-que Moh-ler, un raccourci trop facile, occultant par exemple le fait patent que les conjurés du 20 juillet 1944 ou que Schulze-Boysen, agent so-viétique pendu en 1942, avaient été influencés par les idées de la KR.

 

L'origine du terme "Konservative Revolution"

 

Pour éviter toutes les confusions et les amalgames, Mohler pose au préalable quelques définitions: celle de la KR proprement dite, celle de la "Deutsche Be-wegung", celle de la "Weltanschauung" en tant que véhicule pédago-gique des idées nouvelles. Les termes "konser-vativ" et "revolutionär" apparaissent accolés l'un à l'autre pour la première fois dans le journal berlinois Die Volksstimme  du 24 mai 1848: le po-lémiste qui les unissait était mani-festement mu par l'intention de persifler, de se gausser de ceux qui agitaient les émotions du public en affirmant tout et le contraire de tout (le conservatisme et la révolution), l'esprit troublé par les excès de bière blanche. En 1851, le couple de vocables réapparait —cette fois dans un sens non polémique— dans un ouvrage sur la Russie attribué à Theobald Buddeus. En 1875, Youri Sa-marine donne pour titre "Re-volyoutsionnyi konser-vatizm" à une plaquette qu'il a rédigée avec F. Dmi-triev. Par la suite, Dostoïevski l'utilisera à son tour. En 1900, Charles Maurras l'emploie dans son Enquête sur la Monarchie.  En 1921, Thomas Mann l'utilise dans un article sur la Russie. En Allemagne, le terme "Konservative Revolution" acquiert une vaste no-to-riété quand Hugo von Hoffmannsthal le prononce dans l'un de ses célèbres discours (Das Schriftum als geistiger Raum der Nation  — La littérature comme espace spirituel de la nation; 1927). Von Hoff-manns-thal désigne un processus de maturation intellectuel caractérisé par la recherche de "liens", prenant le relais de la recherche de "liberté", et par la recherche de "totalité", d'"unité" pour échapper aux divi-sions et aux discordes, produits de l'ère libérale.

 

Chez Hoffmannsthal, le concept n'a pas encore d'im-plication politique directe. Mais dans les quelques ti-mi-des essais de politisation de ce concept, dans le con-texte de la République de Weimar agonisante, on per-çoit très nettement une volonté de mettre à l'avant-plan les ca-ractéristiques immuables de l'âme humaine, en réaction contre les idées de 1789 qui pariaient sur la perfectibilité infinie de l'homme. Mais tous les cou-rants qui s'opposèrent jadis à la Révolution Française ne débouchent pas sur la KR. Bon nombre d'entre eux restent simplement partisans de la Restauration, de la Réaction, sont des conservateurs de la vieille école (Altkonservativen).

 

"Konservative Revolution" et "Deutsche Bewegung"

 

Donc si la KR est un refus des idées de 1789, elle n'est pas nostalgie de l'Ancien Régime: elle opte con-fusément, parfois plus clairement, pour une "troisième voie", où seraient absentes l'anarchie, l'absence de valeurs, la fascination du laissez-faire propres au li-béralisme, l'immoralité fondamentale du règne de l'ar-gent, les rigidités de l'Ancien Régime et des abso-lutismes royaux, les platitudes des socialismes et com-munismes d'essence marxiste, les stratégies d'a-ra-sement du passé ("Du passé, faisons table rase..."). A l'aube du XIXième siècle, entre la Révolution et la Restauration, surgit, sur la scène philoso-phique euro-péenne, l'idéalisme allemand, réponse au rationalisme français et à l'empirisme anglais. Parallèlement à cet idéalisme, le roman-tisme secoue les âmes. Sur le ter-rain, comme dans le Tiers-Monde aujourd'hui, les Al-le-mands, exaltés par Fichte, Arndt, Jahn, etc., pren-nent les armes contre Napoléon, incarnation d'un co-lo-nialisme "occidental". Ce mélange de guerre de li-bé-ration, de révolution sociale et de retour sur soi-même, sur sa propre identité, constitue une sorte de préfiguration de la KR, laquelle serait alors le stade atteint par la "Deutsche Bewegung" dans les années 20.

 

Pour en résumer l'esprit, explique Mohler, il faut mé-diter une citation tirée du célébrissime roman de D.H. Lawrence, The plumed Serpent  (= Le serpent à plu-mes, 1926). Ecoutons-la: "Lorsque les Mexicains apprennent le nom de Quetzalcoatl, ils ne devraient le prononcer qu'avec la langue de leur propre sang. Je voudrais que le monde teutonique se mette à repenser dans l'esprit de Thor, de Wotan et d'Yggdrasil, le frêne qui est axe du monde, que les pays druidiques comprennent que leur mystère se trouve dans le gui, qu'ils sont eux-mêmes le Tuatha de Danaan, qu'ils sont ce peuple toujours en vie même s'il a un jour sombré. Les peuples méditerranéens devraient se réapproprier leur Hermès et Tunis son Astharoth; en Perse, c'est Mithra qui devrait ressusciter, en Inde Brahma et en Chine le plus vieux des dragons".

 

Avec Herder, les Allemands ont élaboré et conservé une philosophie qui cherche, elle aussi, à renouer avec les essences intimes des peuples; de cette philosophie sont issus les nationalismes germaniques et slaves. Dans le sens où elle recherche les essences (tout en les préservant et en en conservant les virtualités) et veut les poser comme socles d'un avenir radicalement neuf (donc révolutionnaire), la KR se rapproche du na-tionalisme allemand mais acquiert simultanément une valeur universelle (et non universaliste) dans le sens où la diversité des modes de vie, des pensées, des âmes et des corps, est un fait universel, tandis que l'univer-salisme, sous quelque forme qu'il se présente, cherche à biffer cette prolixité au profit d'un schéma équarisseur qui n'a rien d'universel mais tout de l'ab-straction.

 

La notion de "Weltanschauung"

 

La KR, à défaut d'être une philosophie rigoureuse de type universitaire, est un éventail de Weltan-schau-ungen.  Tandis que la philoso-phie fait partie intégrante de la pensée du vieil Occident, la Weltanschauung apparaît au moment où l'édifice occidental s'effondre. Jadis, les catégories étaient bien contingentées: la pensée, les sentiments, la volonté ne se mêlaient pas en des flux désordonnés comme aujour-d'hui. Mais désormais, dans notre "interrègne", qui succède à l'ef-fondrement du christianisme, les Weltan-schau-ungen  mêlent pensées, senti-ments et volontés au sein d'une tension perpé-tuelle et dynamisante. La pensée, soutenue par des Weltanschauungen,  détient désor-mais un caractère instrumental: on sollicite une mul-titu-de de disciplines pour illustrer des idées déjà pré-alablement conçues, acceptées, choisies. Et ces idées servent à atteindre des objectifs dans la réalité elle-même. La nature particulière (et non plus universelle) de toute pensée nous révèle un monde bigarré, un chaos dynamique, en mutation perpétuelle. Selon Mohler, les Weltanschauungen  ne sont plus véhicu-lées par de purs philosophes ou de purs poètes mais par des êtres hybrides, mi-penseurs, mi-poètes, qui savent conjuguer habilement  —et avec une cer-taine cohérence—   concepts et images. Les gestes de l'existence concrète jouent un rôle primordial chez ces penseurs-poètes: songeons à T.E. Lawrence (d'Ara-bie), Malraux et Ernst Jünger. Leurs existences enga-gées leur ont fait touché du doigt les nerfs de la vie, leur a communiqué une expérience des choses bien plus vive et forte que celle des philosophes et des théologiens, même les plus audacieux. 

 

L'opposition concept/image

 

Les mots et les concepts sont donc insuffisants pour cerner la réalité dans toute sa multiplicité. La parole du poète, l'image, leur sont de loin supérieures. L'ère nouvelle se reflète dès lors davantage dans les travaux des "intellectuels anti-intellectuels", de ceux qui peu-vent, avec génie, manier les images. Un passage du journal de Gerhard Nebel, daté du 19 novembre 1943, illustre parfaitement les positions de Mohler quand il sou-ligne l'importance de la Weltanschauung  par rap-port à la philosophie classique et surtout quand il en-tonne son plaidoyer pour l'intensité de l'existence contre la grisaille des théories, plaidoyer qu'il a ré-sumé dans le concept de "nominalisme" et qui a eu le reten-tissement que l'on sait dans la maturation intel-lectuelle de la "Nouvelle Droite" française (3).

 

Ecoutons donc les paroles de Gerhard Nebel: "Le rap-port entre les deux instruments méta-physiques de l'homme, le concept et l'image, livre à ceux qui veu-lent s'exercer à la com-paraison une matière inépui-sable. On peut dire, ainsi, que le concept est impro-ductif, dans la mesure où il ne fait qu'ordonner ce qui nous tombe sous le sens, ce que nous avons déjà dé-couvert, ce qui est à notre disposition, tandis que l'image génère de la réalité spirituelle et ramène à la surface des éléments jusqu'alors cachés de l'Etre. Le concept opère prudemment des distinctions et des re-groupements dans le cadre strict des faits sûrs; l'image saisit les choses, avec l'impétuosité de l'aventurier et son absence de tout scrupule, et les lance vers le large et l'infini. Le concept vit de peurs; l'image vit du faste triomphant de la découverte. Le concept doit tuer sa proie (s'il n'a pas déjà ramassé rien qu'un cadavre), tandis que l'image fait apparaître une vie toute pétil-lante. Le concept, en tant que concept, exclut tout mys-tère; l'image est une unité paradoxale de contraires, qui nous éclaire tout en honorant l'obscur. Le concept est vieillot; l'image est toujours fraîche et jeune. Le concept est la victime du temps et vieillit vite; l'image est toujours au-delà du temps. Le concept est subor-donné au progrès, tout comme les sciences, elles aussi, appartiennent à la caté-gorie du progrès, tandis que l'image relève de l'instant. Le concept est écono-mie; l'image est gaspillage. Le concept est ce qu'il est; l'image est toujours davantage que ce qu'elle semble être. Le concept sollicite le cerveau mais l'image solli-cite le cœur. Le concept ne meut qu'une périphérie de l'existen-ce; l'image, elle, agit sur l'ensemble de l'existence, sur son noyau. Le concept est fini; l'image, infinie. Le concept simplifie; l'image honore la diversité. Le concept prend parti; l'image s'abstient de juger. Le concept est gé-néral; l'image est avant tout individuelle et, même là où l'on peut faire de l'image une image générale et où l'on peut lui subordonner des phénomènes, cette action de subordonnance rap-pelle des chasses passionnantes; l'ennui que suscite l'inclusion, l'enfermement de faits de monde dans des concepts, reste étranger à l'image...".

 

Les idées véhiculées par les Weltanschauungen s'incarnent dans le réel arbitrairement, de façon impré-visible, discontinue. En effet, ces idées ne sont plus des idées pures, elles n'ont plus une place fixe et immuable dans une quelconque empyrée, au-delà de la réalité. Elles sont bien au contraire imbriquées, pri-sonnières des aléas du réel, soumises à ses mutations, aux conflits qui forment sa trame. Etudier l'impact des Weltan-schauungen,  dont celles de la KR, c'est poser une topographie de courants souterrains, qui ne sau-tent pas directement aux yeux de l'obser-vateur.

 

Une exigence de la KR: dépasser le wilhelminisme

 

Quand Arthur Moeller van den Bruck parle d'un "Troisième Reich" en 1923 (4), il ne songe évidem-ment pas à l'Etat hitlérien, dont rien ne laisse alors prévoir l'avènement, mais d'un système politique qui succéderait au IIième Reich bismarcko-wilhelminien et où les oppo-sitions entre le socialisme et le nationa-lisme, en-tre la gauche et la droite seraient sublimées en une synthèse nouvelle. De plus, cette idée d'un "troisième" Empire, ajoute Mohler, renoue avec toute une spéculation philosophique christiano-européenne très ancienne, qui parlait d'un troisième règne comme du règne de l'esprit (saint). Dès le IIième siècle, les montanistes, secte chrétienne, évoquent l'avènement d'un règne de l'esprit saint, successeur des règnes de Dieu le Père (ancien testament) et de Dieu le Fils (nouveau testament et incarnation), qui serait la syn-thèse parfaite des contraires. Dans le cadre de l'histoire allemande, on repère une longue aspiration à la syn-thèse, à la conciliation de l'inconciliable: par exemple, entre les Habs-bourg et les Hohenzollern. Après la Grande Guer-re, après la réconciliation nationale dans le sang et les tranchées, Moeller van den Bruck est l'un de ces hommes qui espèrent une synthèse entre la gauche et la droite par le truchement d'un "troisième parti". Evidemment, les hitlé-riens, en fondant leur "troisième Reich", prétendront transposer dans le réel toutes ses vieilles aspirations pour les asseoir définiti-ve-ment dans l'histoire. La KR et/ou la "Deutsche Be-wegung" se scinde alors en deux groupes: ceux qui estiment que le IIIième Reich de Hitler est une falsifi-cation et entrent en dissidence, et ceux qui pensent que c'est une première étape vers le but ultime et acceptent le fait accompli.

 

Sous le IIième Reich historique, existait une "opposition de droite", mécontente du caractère libé-ral/darwiniste de la révolution industrielle allemande, du rôle de l'industrie et du grand capital, de l'étroitesse d'esprit bourgeoise, du façadisme pompeux, avec ses stucs et son tape-à-l'oeil. Le "conservatisme" officiel de l'époque n'est plus qu'un décor, que poses mata-mores-ques, tandis que l'économie devient le destin. Ce bourgeoisisme à colifichets militaires suscite des réactions. Les unes sont réformistes; les autres exigent une rupture radicale. Parmi les réfor-mistes, il faut compter le mouvement chrétien-social du Pasteur Adolf Stoecker, luttant pour un "Empire social", pour une "voie caritative" vers la justice sociale. Les élé-ments les plus dynami-ques du mouvement finiront par adhérer à la sociale-démocratie. Quant au "Mouvement Pan-Ger-maniste" (Alldeutscher Verband),  il sombre-ra dans un impérialisme utopique, sur fond de roman-tisme niais et de cliquetis de sabre. Les autres mouve-ments restent périphériques: les mouvements "artistiques" de masse, les mar-xistes qui veulent une voie nationale, les pre-miers "Völkischen",  etc.

 

A l'ombre de Nietzsche...

 

Face à ces réformateurs qui ne débouchent sur rien ou disparaissent parce que récupérés, se trouvent d'abord quelques isolés. Des isolés qui mûrissent et agissent à l'ombre de Nietzsche, ce penseur qui ne peut être classé parmi les prota-gonistes de la "Deutsche Bewe-gung" ni parmi les précurseurs de la KR, bien que, sans lui et sans son œuvre, cette dernière n'aurait pas été telle qu'elle fut. Mais comme les isolés qu'a-limente la pensée de Nietzsche sont nombreux, très différents les uns des autres, il s'en trouve quelques-uns qui amorcent véritablement le processus de maturation de la KR. Mohler en cite deux, très importants: Paul de Lagarde et Julius Langbehn. L'orientaliste Paul de La-garde voulait fonder une religion allemande, appelée à remplacer et à renforcer le message des christia-nismes protestants et catholiques en pariant sur la veine mys-tique, notamment celle de Meister Eckhart le Rhénan et de Ruusbroeck le Bra-bançon (5). Julius Langbehn est surtout l'homme d'un livre, Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890; = Rembrandt éducateur) (6). A partir de la person-nalité de Rembrandt, Langbehn chante la mysti-que profonde du Nord-Ouest européen et sug-gère une synthèse entre la rudesse froide mais vertueuse du Nord et l'enthousiasme du Sud.

 

Mouvement völkisch et mouvement de jeunesse

 

En marge de ses deux isolés, qui connurent un succès retentissant, deux courants sociaux contri-buent à briser les hypocrisies et le matérialisme de l'ère wilhelmi-nienne: le mouvement völkisch  et le mouvement de jeunesse (Jugendbewe-gung). Par völkisch,  nous ex-plique Mohler, l'on entend les groupes animés par une philosophie qui pose l'homme comme essentiellement dépen-dant de ses origines, que celles-ci proviennent d'une matière informelle, la race, ou du travail de l'histoire (le peuple ou la tribu étant, dans cette op-tique, forgé par une histoire longue et com-mune). Proches de l'idéologie völkische  sont les doctrines qui posent l'homme comme déterminé par un "paysage spirituel" ou par la langue qu'il parle. Dans les années 1880, le mouvement völkisch  se constitue en un front du refus assez catégorique: il est surtout antisémite et remplace l'ancien antisémitisme confessionnel par un antisémitisme "raciste" et déterministe, lequel prétend que le Juif reste juif en dépit de ses options person-nelles réelles ou affectées. Le mouvement völkisch  se divise en deux tendan-ces, l'une aristocratique, dirigée par Max Lieber-mann von Sonnenberg, qui cherche à rapprocher certaines catégories du peuple de l'aristocratie conservatrice; l'autre est radicale, démo-cratique et issue de la base. C'est en Hesse que cette pre-mière radicalité völkische se hissera au niveau d'un parti de masse, sous l'impulsion d'Otto Böckel, le "roi des paysans hessois", qui renoue avec les souvenirs de la grande guerre des paysans du XVIième siècle et rêve d'un soulève-ment généralisé contre les grands capitalistes (dont les Juifs) et les Junker,  alliés objectifs des premiers.

 

Le mouvement de jeunesse est une révolte des jeunes contre les pères, contre l'artificialité du wilhelminisme, contre les conventions qui étouf-fent les cœurs. Créé par Karl Fischer en 1896, devenu le "Wandervogel" (= "oiseau migra-teur") en 1901, le mouvement connait des dé-buts anarchisants et romantiques, avec des éco-liers et lycéens, coiffés de bérets fantaisistes et la gui-tare en bandoulière, qui partent en randon-née, pour quitter les villes et découvrir la beauté des paysages (7). A partir de 1910-1913, le mou-vement de jeunesse acquerra une forme plus stricte et plus disciplinée: la principale organisation porteuse de ce renouveau fut la Frei-deutsche Jugend  (8).

 

Le choc de 1914

 

Quand éclate la guerre de 1914, les peuples croient à une ultime épreuve purgative qui pulvérisera les bar-rières de partis, de classes, de confessions, etc. et conduira à la "totalité" espé-rée. Thomas Mann, dans les premières semaines de la guerre, parle de "purification", de grand nettoyage par le vide qui ba-laiera le bric-à-brac wilhelminien. Peu importaient la victoire, les motifs, les intérêts: seule comptait la guerre comme hygiène, aux yeux des peuples lassés par les artifices bourgeois. Mais les enthousiasmes du début s'enliseront, après la bataille de la Marne, dans la guerre des tranchées et dans l'implacable choc mé-canique des matériels. "Toute finesse a été broyée, piétinée", écrit Ernst Jünger. Le XIXième siècle périt dans ce maelstrom de fer et de feu, les façades rhéto-riques s'écroulent pulvérisées, les contingente-ments proprets perdent tout crédit et deviennent ridicules.

 

De cette tourmente, surgit, discrète, une nouvelle "totalité", une "totalité" spartiate, une "totalité" de souffrances, avec des alternances de joies et de morts. Une chose apparaît certai-ne, écrit encore Ernst Jünger, c'est "que la vie, dans son noyau le plus intime, est indestructi-ble". Un philosophe ami d'Ernst Jünger, Hugo Fischer, décrit cet avènement de la totalité nou-velle, dans un essai de guerre paru dans la revue "nationale-bolchévique" Widerstand (Janvier 1934; "Der deutsche Infanterist von 1917"): "Le culte des grands mots n'a plus de raison d'être aujourd'hui... La guerre mondiale a été le dai-mon qui a fracassé et pulvérisé le pathétisme. La guerre n'a plus de com-mencement ni de fin, le fantassin gris se trouve quelque part au mi-lieu des masses de terre boueuse qui s'étendent à perte de vue; il est dans son trou sale, prêt à bondir; il est un rien au sein d'une monotonie grise et désolée, qui a toujours été telle et sera toujours telle mais, en même temps, il est le point focal d'une nou-velle souveraineté. Là-bas, quelque part, il y avait ja-dis de beaux systèmes, scrupuleusement construits, des systèmes de tran--chées et d'abris; ces systèmes ne l'intéres-sent plus; il reste là, debout, ou s'accroupit, à moitié mort de soif, quelque part dans la campagne libre et ouverte; l'opposition entre la vie et la mort est repoussée à la lisière de ses souvenirs. Il n'est ni un individu ni une com-munauté, il est une particule d'une force élé-mentaire, planant au-dessus des champs rava-gés. Les concepts ont été bouleversés dans sa tête. Les vieux concepts. Les écailles lui tombent des yeux. Dans le brouillard infini, que scrutent les yeux de son esprit, l'aube semble se lever et il commence, sans sa-voir ce qu'il fait, à penser dans les catégories du siècle prochain. Les ca-nons balayent cette mer de saletés et de pourriture, qui avait été le domaine de son exis-tence, et les entonnoirs qu'ont creusés les obus sont sa demeure (...) Il a survécu à toutes les formes de guerre; le voilà, incorruptible et immortel, et il ne sait plus ce qui est beau, ce qui est laid. Son regard pénètre les choses avec la tranquillité d'un jet de flamme. Avec ou sans mérite, il est resté, a survécu (...) L'"intériorité" s'est projetée vers l'extérieur, s'est transformée de fond en comble, et cette extériorité est devenue totale; intériorité et extériorité fusion-nent; (...) On ne peut plus distinguer quand l'extériorité s'arrête et quand l'homme com-mence; celui-ci ne laisse plus rien derrière lui qui pourrait être réservée à une sphère privée".

 

La défaite de 1918: une nécessité

 

En novembre 1918, l'Etat allemand wilhelminien a cessé d'exister: la vieille droite parle du "coup de cou-teau dans le dos", œuvre des gau-ches qui ont trahi une armée sur le point de vaincre. Dans cette perspective, la défaite n'est qu'un hasard. Mais pour les tenants de la KR, la défaite est une nécessité et il convient main-tenant de déchiffrer le sens de cette défaite. Franz Schauwecker, figure de la mouvance na-tio-nale-révolu-tionnaire, écrit: "Nous devions perdre la guerre pour gagner la Nation".  Car une victoire de l'Allemagne wilhelminienne aurait été une défaite de l'"Allemagne secrète". L'écrivain Edwin Erich Dwin-ger, de père nord-allemand et de mère russe, engagé à 17 ans dans un régiment de dragons, prisonnier en Si-bérie, combattant enrôlé de force dans les armées rouge et blanche, revenu en Allemagne en 1920, met cette idée dans la bouche d'un pope russe, personnage de sa trilogie romanesque consacrée à la Russie (9): "Vous l'avez perdue la grande Guerre, c'est sûr... Mais qui sait, cela vaut peut-être mieux ainsi? Car si vous l'aviez gagnée, Dieu vous aurait quitté... L'orgueil et l'oppres-sion [du wilhelminisme, ndt] se seraient multi-pliées par cent; une jouissance vide de sens aurait tué toute étincelle divine en vous... Un pourrissement rapide vous aurait frappé; vous n'auriez pas connu de véritable ascension... Si vous aviez ga-gné, vous seriez en fin de course... Mais maintenant vous êtes face à une nouvelle aurore...".        

 

Après la guerre vient la République de Weimar, mal aimée parce qu'elle perpétue, sous des ori-peaux répu-blicains, le style de vie bourgeois, celui du parvenu. Cette situation est inaccepta-ble pour les guerriers reve-nus des tranchées: dans cette république bourgeoise, qui a troqué les uniformes chamarrés et les casques à pointe contre les fracs des notaires et des banquiers, ils "bivouaquent dans les appartements bourgeois, ne pouvant plus renoncer à la simplicité virile de la vie militaire", comme le disait l'un d'eux. Ils seront les recrues idéales des partis extrémistes, communiste ou national-socialiste. La Républi-que de Weimar se dé-ploiera en trois phases: une phase tumultueuse, s'étendant de novembre 1918, avec la proclamation de la République, à la fin de 1923, quand les Français quittent la Ruhr et que le putsch Hitler/Ludendorff est maté à Munich; une phase de calme, qui durera jus-qu'à la crise de 1929, où la République, sous l'impulsion de Stresemann, jugule l'inflation et où les passions semblent s'apaiser. A partir de la crise, l'édifice répu-blicain vole en éclats et les nationaux-socialistes sortent vainqueurs de l'arène.

 

Le débourgeoisement total

 

La République de Weimar a connu des débuts très dif-ficiles: elle a dû mater dix-huit coups de force de la gauche et trois coups de force de la droite, sans compter les manœuvres séparatistes en Rhénanie, fo-mentées par la France. Dans cette tourmente, on en est arrivé à une situation (apparemment) absurde: un gou-vernement en majorité socialiste appelle les ouvriers à la grève générale pour bloquer le putsch d'extrême-droite de Kapp; cette grève générale est l'étincelle qui déclenche l'insurrection communiste de la Ruhr et, pour étrangler celle-ci, le gouvernement ap-pel-le les sympathisants des putschistes de Kapp à la rescousse! La situation était telle que l'esprit public, secoué, pre-nait une cure sévère de dé-bourgeoisement.

 

Bien sûr, le débourgeoisement total n'affectaient qu'une infime minorité, mais cette minorité était quand même assez nombreuse pour que ses attitudes et son esprit déteignent quelque peu sur l'opinion publique et sur la mentalité générale de l'époque. La guerre avait arraché plusieurs clas-ses d'âge au confort bourgeois, lequel n'exerçait plus le moindre attrait sur elles. Pour ces hommes jeunes, la vie active du guerrier était qua-litativement supérieure à celle du bourgeois et ils haïs-saient l'idée de se morfondre dans des fauteuils mous, les pantoufles aux pieds. C'est pourquoi l'ardeur de la guerre, ils allaient la rechercher et la retrouver dans les "Corps Francs", ceux de l'intérieur et ceux de l'ex-térieur. Ceux de l'intérieur se moulaient dans les structures d'auto-défense locales (Einwohner-wehr)  et permettaient, en fin de compte, un retour progressif à la vie civile, assorti quand même d'une promptitude à reprendre l'assaut dans les rangs communistes ou, surtout, na-tionaux-socialistes. Ceux de l'extérieur, qui combattaient les Polonais en Haute-Silésie et avaient arraché l'Annaberg de haute lutte, ou affrontaient les armées bolchéviques dans le Baltikum, regroupaient des soldats perdus, de nouveaux lansquenets, des irré-cupérables pour la vie bourgeoise, des pélérins de l'absolu, des vagabonds spartiates en prise directe avec l'élé-mentaire. Dans leurs âmes sauvages, l'esprit de la KR s'incrustera dans sa plus pure quin-tessence.

 

Parallèlement aux Corps Francs, d'autres structures d'accueil existaient pour les jeunes et les soldats fa-rouches: les Bünde du mouvement de jeunesse, lequel, avec la guerre, avait perdu toutes ses fantaisies anar-chistes et abandonné toutes ses rêveries philoso-phiques et idéalistes. Ensuite les partis de toutes obé-diences recru-taient ces ensauvagés, ces inquiets, ces cheva-liers de l'élémentaire pour les engager dans leurs formations de combat, leurs services d'ordre. Avant le choc de la guerre, le révolutionnaire typique ne renon-çait par radicalement aux for-mes de l'existence bour-geoise: il contestait simplement le fait que ces formes, assorties de richesses et de positions sociales avanta-geuses, étaient réservées à une petite minorité. L'engage-ment du révolutionnaire d'avant 1914 visait à généraliser ces formes bourgeoises d'existence, à les étendre à l'ensemble de la société, classe ouvrière comprise. Le révolutionnaire de type nou-veau, en re-vanche, ne partage pas cet uto-pisme eudémoniste: il veut éradiquer toute référence à ces valeurs bour-geoises haïes, tout sentiment positif envers elles. Pour le bourgeois frileux, convaincu de détenir la vérité, la formule de toute civilisation, le révolutionnaire nouveau est un "nihiliste", un dangereux mar-ginal, un personnage inquiétant.

 

Les lansquenets modernes

 

Mais les partis bourgeois, battus en brèche, incapables de faire face aux aléas qu'étaient les exigences des Al-liés et les dérèglements de l'économie mondiale, la violence de la rue et la famine des classes défavori-sées, ont été obligés de recourir à la force pour se maintenir en selle et de faire appel à ces lansquenets modernes pour encadrer leurs militants. Ces cadres issus des Corps Francs se rendent alors incontour-nables au sein des partis qui les utilisent, mais conservent toujours une certaine distance, en marge du gros des militants.

 

Ce processus n'est pas seulement vrai pour le national-socialisme, avec ses turbulents SA. Chez les commu-nistes, des bandes de solides bagarreurs adhèrent au Roter Kampfbund. Cer-taines organisations restent in-dépendantes for-mellement, comme le Kampfbund Wi-king  du Capitaine Hermann Ehrhardt, le Bund Ober-land  du Capitaine Beppo Römer et du Dr. Friedrich Weber, le Wehrwolf  de Fritz Kloppe et la Reichs-flagge  du Capitaine Adolf Heiß. Le Stahl-helm, orga-nisation paramilitaire d'anciens com-battants, dirigée par Seldte et Duesterberg, est proche des Deutschna-tionalen (DNVP). Le Jungdeutscher Orde (Jungdo)  de Mahraun sert de service d'ordre à la Demokratische Partei. Quant aux sociaux-démocrates (SPD), leur or-ganisation paramilitaire s'appelait le Reichs-ban-ner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, dont les chefs étaient Hörsing et Höltermann.

 

La quasi similitude entre toutes ses formations faisait que l'on passait allègrement de l'une à l'autre, au gré des conflits personnels. Beppo Römer quittera ainsi l'Oberland  pour passer à la KPD communiste. Bodo Uhse (10) fera exacte-ment le même itinéraire, mais en passant par la NSDAP et le mouvement révolution-naire pay-san, la Landvolkbewegung. Giesecke passera de la KPD à la NSDAP. Contre les Français dans la Ruhr, les militants communistes sabotent instal-lations et voies ferrées sous la conduite d'of-ficiers prussiens; SA et Roter Kampfbund colla-borent contre le gouver-nement à Berlin en 1930-31.

 

Dans ce contexte, Mohler souligne surtout l'apparition et la maturation de deux mouve-ments d'idées, le fa-meux "national-bolché-visme" et le "Troisième Front" (Dritte Front).  Si l'on analyse de façon dualiste l'affrontement majeur de l'époque, entre nationaux-so-cialistes et communistes, l'on dira que l'idéologie des forces communistes dérive des idées de 1789, tan-dis que celles du national-socialisme de cel-les de 1813, de la Deutsche Bewegung.  Il n'em-pêche que, dans une plage d'intersection réduite, des contacts fructueux entre les deux mondes se sont produits. Dans quelques cerveaux perti-nents, un socialisme ra-dical fusionne avec un nationalisme tout aussi radical, afin de sceller l'alliance des deux nations "prolétariennes", l'Allemagne et la Russie, contre l'Occident capitaliste.

 

Trois vagues de national-bolchévisme

 

Trois vagues de "national-bolchévisme" se suc-céde-ront. La première date de 1919/1920. Elle est une ré-action directe contre Versailles et atteint son apogée lors de la guerre russo-polonaise de 1920. La section de Hambourg de la KPD, dirigée par Heinrich Lauf-fenberg et Fritz Wolffheim, appelle à la guerre popu-laire et nationale contre l'Occident (11). Rapidement, des contacts sont pris avec des nationalistes de pure eau comme le Comte Ernst zu Reventlow. Quand la cavalerie de Boudienny se rapproche du Corridor de Dantzig, un espoir fou germe: foncer vers l'Ouest avec l'Armée Rouge et réduire à néant le nouvel ordre de Versailles. Weygand, en réorganisant l'armée polo-naise en août 1920, brise l'élan russe et annihile les espoirs allemands. Lauffenberg et Wolffheim sont ex-communiés par le Komintern et leur nouvelle organi-sation, la KAPD (Kommunisti-sche Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands),  se mue en une secte insignifiante.

 

La seconde vague date de 1923, quand l'occupation de la Ruhr et l'inflation obligent une nouvelle fois natio-nalisme et communisme à fusionner. Radek, fonction-naire du Komintern, rend un vibrant hommage à Schlageter, fusillé par les Français. Moeller van den Bruck répond. Un dialogue voit le jour. Dans le jour-nal Die Rote Fahne, on peut lire les lignes suivantes, parfaitement à même de satisfaire et les natio-nalistes et les communistes: "La Nation s'effrite. L'héritage du prolétariat allemand, créé par les peines de générations d'ouvriers est menacé par la botte des militaristes fran-çais et par la faiblesse et la lâcheté de la bourgeoi-sie alle-mande, fébrile à l'idée de récolter ses petits pro-fits. Seule la classe ouvrière peut désormais sauver la Nation". Mais cette seconde vague natio-nale-bol-chéviste n'est restée qu'un symptôme de fièvre: d'un côté comme de l'autre, on s'est contenté de formuler de belles proclamations.

 

Plus sérieuse sera la troisième vague nationale-bolchéviste, explique Mohler. Elle s'amorce dès 1930. A la crise économique mondiale et à ses effets sociaux, s'ajoute le Plan de réparations de l'Américain Young qui réduit encore les maigres ressources des Alle-mands. Une fois de plus, les questions nationale et so-ciale se mêlent étroite-ment. Gregor Strasser, chef de l'aile gauche de la NSDAP, et Heinz Neumann, tacti-cien commu-niste du rapprochement avec les natio-naux, parlent abondamment de l'aspiration anti-capita-liste du peuple allemand. Des officiers natio-nalistes, aristocratiques voire nationaux-socia-listes, passent à la KPD comme le célèbre Lieutenant Scheringer, Ludwig Renn, le Comte Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, les chefs de la Landvolkbewegung  comme Bodo Uhse ou Bruno von Salomon, le Capitaine des Corps Francs Beppo Römer, héros de l'épisode de l'Annaberg. Dans la pratique, la KPD soutient l'initiative du Stahl-helm contre le gouvernement prussien en août 1931; communistes et natio-naux-socialistes organisent de concert la grève des transports en commun berlinois de novem-bre 1932. Toutes ces alliances demeurent ponc-tuel-les et strictement tactiques, donc sans lendemain.

 

La tendance anti-russe de la NSDAP munichoise (Hitler et Rosenberg) réduit à néant le tandem KPD/NSDAP, particulièrement bien rodé à Berlin. L'URSS signe des pactes de non-agression avec la Pologne (25.1.1932) et avec la France (29.11.1932). Au sein de la KPD, la tendance Thälmann, internatio-naliste et anti-fas-ciste, l'emporte sur la tendance Neu-mann, socia-liste et nationale.

 

Mais ce national-bolchévisme idéologique et militant, présent dans de larges couches de la population, du moins dans les plus turbulentes, a son pendant dans certains cercles très influents de la diplomatie, regrou-pés autour du "Comte rouge", Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, et du Baron von Maltzan. La position de Brockdorff-Rantzau était en fait plus nuancée qu'on ne l'a cru. Quoi qu'il en soit, leur optique était de se dé-gager des exigences françaises en jouant la carte russe, exactement dans le même esprit de la politique prussienne russophile de 1813 (les "Accords de Taurog-gen"), tout en voulant reconstituer un équilibre euro-péen à la Bis-marck.

 

Le "troisième front" (Dritte Front)

 

Pour distinguer clairement la KR du national-socia-lisme, il faut savoir, explique Mohler, qu'avant la "Nuit des Longs Couteaux" du 30 juin 1934, où Hit-ler élimine quelques adversai-res et concurrents, inté-rieurs et extérieurs, le national-socialisme est une idéologie floue, re-celant virtuellement plusieurs pos-sibles. Ce fut, selon les circonstances, à la fois sa force et sa faiblesse face à un communisme à la doc-trine claire, nette mais trop souvent rigide. Mohler énumère quelques types humains rassemblés sous la bannière hitlérienne: des ouvriers re-belles, des resca-pés de l'aventure des Corps Francs de la Baltique, des boutiquiers en colère qui veulent faire supprimer les magasins à rayons multiples, des entrepreneurs qui veulent la paix sociale et des débouchés extérieurs nouveaux. Sur le plan de la politique étrangère, les options sont également diverses: alliance avec l'Italie fasciste contre le bolchévisme; al-lian-ce de tous les pays germaniques avec mini-misation des rapports avec les peuples du Sud, décrétés "fellahisés"; alliance avec une Russie redevenue plus nationale et débarrassée de ses velléités communistes et internationalistes, afin de forger un pacte indéfectible des "have-nots"  con-tre les nations capitalistes. De plus, la NSDAP des premières années du pouvoir, compte dans ses rangs des fédéra-listes bavarois et des centralistes prussiens, des catho-liques et des protestants convaincus, et, enfin, des mi-litants farouchement hostiles à toutes les formes de christianisme.

 

Cette panade idéologique complexe est le propre des partis de masse et Hitler, pour des raisons pratiques et tactiques, tenait à ce que le flou soit conservé, afin de garder un maximum de militants et d'électeurs. Avant la prise du pou-voir, plusieurs tenants de la KR avaient constaté que cette démagogie contribuerait tôt ou tard à falsifier et à galvauder l'idée précise, tranchée et argu-mentée qu'ils se faisaient de la nation. Pour éviter l'avènement de la falsification nationale-socialiste et/ou communiste, il fallait à leurs yeux créer un "troisième front" (Dritte Front),  basé sur une synthèse cohérente et destiné à remplacer le système de Weimar. Entre le drapeau rouge de la KPD et les chemises brunes de la NSDAP, les dissidents optent pour le drapeau noir de la révolte paysanne, hissé par les révoltés du XVIième siècle et par les amis de Claus Heim (12). Le drapeau noir est "le dra-peau de la terre et de la misère, de la nuit allemande et de l'état d'alerte".

 

Le rôle de Hans Zehrer

 

L'un des partisans les plus chaleureux de ce "troisième front" fut Hans Zehrer, éditeur de la revue Die Tat d'octobre 1931 à 1933. Dans un article intitulé signifi-cativement Rechts oder Links? (Die Tat, 23. Jg., H.7, Okt. 1931), Zehrer explique que l'anti-libéralisme en Allemagne s'est scindé en deux ailes, une aile droite et une aile gauche. L'aile droite puise dans le réservoir des sentiments nationaux mais fait passer les questions sociales au second plan. L'aile gauche, elle, accorde le primat aux questions sociales et tente de gagner du ter-rain en matière de nationalisme. Le camp des anti-libéraux est donc partagé entre deux pôles: le national et le social. Cette opposition risque à moyen ou long terme d'épuiser les combattants, de lasser les masses et de n'aboutir à rien. En fin de course, les appareils dirigeants des partis communiste et national-socialiste ne défendent pas les intérêts fondamentaux de la po-pulation, mais exclusive-ment leurs propres intérêts. Les bases des deux partis devraient, écrit Zehrer, se détourner de leurs chefs et se regrouper en une "troisième communauté", qui serait la synthèse parfaite des pôles social et national, antagonisés à mau-vais escient.

 

Derrière Zehrer se profilait l'ombre du Général von Schleicher qui, lui, cherchait à sauver Weimar en atti-rant dans un "troisième front" les groupes socialisants internes à la NSDAP (Gre-gor Strasser), quelques syn-dicalistes sociaux-dé-mocrates, etc. Mais l'assem-bla-ge était trop hétéroclite: KPD et NSDAP ré-sistent à l'entre-prise de fractionnement. Le "troisième front" ne sera qu'un rassemblement de groupes situés "entre deux chaises", sans force motrice dé-cisive.

 

Robert STEUCKERS.

 

(La suite de cette recension, rendant compte d'un ouvrage abso-lument capital pour comprendre le mouvement des idées poli-tiques de notre siècle, paraîtra dans nos éditions ultérieures. Nous mettrons l'accent sur les fondements philosophiques de la KR et sur ses principaux groupes).

 

Armin MOHLER, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Ein Handbuch (Dritte, um einen Ergänzungsband erweiterte Auflage 1989), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darm-stadt, 1989, I-XXX + 567 S., Ergänzungsband, I-VIII + 131 S., DM 89 (beide zusammen); DM 37 (Ergänzungsband einzeln). 

 

 

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