Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle

 

Jonathan Bowden on Thomas Carlyle

T. S. Eliot: Ultra-Conservative Dandy

T. S. Eliot:
Ultra-Conservative Dandy

 

 

By Jonathan Bowden

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/ 

 

For a brief period in the late 1990s there was an attempt to demonize T. S. Eliot as an anti-Semite. This opinion was most ably canvassed by Anthony Julius’ T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form ^[2], but the attempt failed, and Eliot’s reputation as a poet now stands even higher than ever.

Thomas Stearns Eliot’s most controversial book was the collection of essays drawn from a series of lectures he gave in 1934 called After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy ^[3]. In this book, Eliot argued for an organic society — primarily from a Christian perspective — and he took a decidedly non-philo-Semitic position, considering that the more organic the society, was the better its prospects.

It seems an utter travesty, at this date, that the most famous English language poet of the twentieth century should be treated in this way.

For the interesting things to say about this fey, classical, and austere man have little to do with this (or his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915) but, rather, revolve around his contribution to literary criticism. In this regard, his development of the idea of a tradition within a writer’s oeuvre proves crucial — witness his own distancing over time from the thesis of “The Wasteland” and “The Hollow Men” as he turned to Christianity, metaphysically speaking. The idea of not seeing works in isolation but from a whole perspective is very interesting in a deeply conservative way.

This further ramifies with Eliot’s coolness and classicism in the arts — if compared and contrasted to his hostility to the Romantics, particularly a left-wing revolutionary like Shelley. (Eliot would have had no time for the literary prognosis of the Trotskyist Paul Foot in his Red Shelley ^[4].) Nonetheless, for him, poetry was a codification but never a standardization. It was an escape from emotion through distancing — rather than an achievement of emotional excess through revelation. All of this led to his espousal of the metaphysical poets — Donne, Vaughan, Marvell, and Thomas — as he praised their use of metaphysics in poetry to provide a unified sensibility.

Possibly Eliot’s most famous literary idea was the objective correlative — whereby he sought a general, and culturally relevant, explanation of works which transcended personal responses to them. This involved a semi-objective as well as a subjective reading of the text. A piece attempts to mean what it says, but it also indicates states of mind and experiences which are factual and that can be essayed without being unduly personal about literature.

This hunt for a more general meaning indicates a social vision for art in a man whose own work is very abstruse and ‘difficult’ to understand. This is particularly true of the early poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and “The Wasteland” (1922), but changes somewhat after “Ash Wednesday” in 1927.

If we might turn to the poetry now: “Prufrock” begins with a stream of consciousness which is typical of early modernism — although much of Eliot’s early poetic vision owes something to his discovery of Arthur Symonds’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature ^[5] in 1908. Prufrock begins with comparing the evening to an etherized patient upon a table which was considered scandalous at the time when Georgian poetry was all the rage. There is even a hint of the right-wing nihilism of Gottfried Benn in early Eliot. In “Prufrock” he deals with a disappointed life, states of physical and intellectual inertia, and the absence of both carnal love and spiritual progress.

In October 1922 “The Wasteland,” edited extensively by Ezra Pound, made its appearance and extended the analysis, amid many other concerns, to his failing marriage to Vivienne, both of whom were suffering from nervous and mental disorders at the time. The poem definitely chimes with the post-First World War disillusionment of an entire generation.

“The Hollow Men” in 1925 confirms and extends this triad of despair until his conversion to Anglicanism from Unitarianism in 1927. This event was definitely the key metaphysical moment in this very fastidious man’s life. The hunger for meaning and a dormant metaphysical purpose came out. For, in his conversion or re-conversion, Eliot illuminated the idea that life is spiritually barren and meaningless without an over-arching quest, sensibility or teleology.

Certainly once his conversion is definite, the pitch of Eliot’s life and his poetry (above all) takes a decisive turn. “Ash Wednesday,” the “Ariel” poems, and the “Four Quartets” (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948) are much more certain in their direction, as well as being more casual, melodic, and contemplative in their creative method. Although secular literati remain discomfited by these poems’ transparent religiosity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the “Four Quartets” which is immersed in Christian thought, traditions, and imagery.

Much of his creative energy after “Ash Wednesday” went into writing plays in an attempt to broaden the poet’s social role — all of these pieces were verse dramas. The whole point of Sweeney Agonistes (1932), The Rock (1934), and Murder in the Cathedral dealing with Thomas a Beckett’s assassination was to bring a larger or wider audience to a conservative purpose for Christian poetry.

For Eliot is that rare thing in twentieth century literary art — an ex-nihilist, someone who reverses the positions of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (without the enervation) and wanders back towards C. S. Lewis, Belloc, and Chesterton. I think the key point about these partial dandies and Right-wing conservative intellectuals is their belief in belief. . . . For, without the prospect (even in its absence) of metaphysics, life had no ultimate meaning for them, or for us. Almost everything else about them is incidental to this truth.

---

 

 

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God

Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God

by Jonathan Bowden

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

Wyndham Lewis
The Apes of God ^[2]

The Apes of God happens to be one of the most devastating satires to be published in the English language since the days of Dryden and Pope. It appeared in a Private Press edition ^[3] (prior to general release), and at over 600 pages it was the size of your average London telephone directory.

The Apes deals, in ultra-modernist vein, with a catalog or slide-show of dilettantes from the London of the inter-war period. It is, in reality, a gargantuan satire against the Bloomsbury Group and all of its works. The historical importance of the Bloomsbury Group is that they were the incubator for all the left-liberal ideas which have now hardened to a totalitarian permafrost in Western life. This is the real and crucial point of this gargantuan effort — an otherwise neglected work.

To recapitulate some of the detail: the novel concerns the sentimental education of a young idiot (Dan Boleyn) in the ways of Bloomsbury (apedom). During this prologue he meets a great galaxy of the millionaire bohemia so excoriated by Lewis. The chapters and sub-headings basically deal with his education in ideological matters (not that the simpleton Dan would see it in that way), and he is assisted in his insights by Pierpoint (a Lewis substitute), the Pierpointian ventriloquist and contriver of ‘broadcasts’, Horace Zagreus, as well as Starr-Smith. The latter is Pierpoint’s political secretary, a Welsh firebrand, who dresses as a Blackshirt for Lord Osmund’s fancy-dress or Lenten party which makes up a quarter to a third of the book.

^[4]

Wyndam Lewis' portrait of Edith Sitwell

The liberals who are dissected are James Julius Rattner (a Semitic version of James Joyce), Lionel Kien and family, Proustians extraordinaire, various poseurs and Bullish lesbians, as well as the Sitwell family group who are depicted as the Finnian Shaws. The Sitwells are all but forgotten today, but they were highly influential in the world between the Wars — as is witnessed in John Pearson’s masterly biography Facades: Osbert, Edith and Sachaverell Sitwell. It is no accident to say that this satire has kept the Sitwells in contemporary culture, despite the fact that they are the butt of Lewis’ ferocious wit.

Throughout this odyssey through Apedom various themes are disentangled. The first is a penchant for the class war — in a parlor Bolshevik manner — from those who superficially have the most to lose from it. This leads to an active collaboration between masters and servants ahead of time. The next “war” to which these pacifists hook their star is the age-war between the generations which is best illustrated by the Sitwells’ attitude to their aged Patriarch, Cockeye in the novel.

Other cults or pseudo-cults of the lower thirties (i.e., the twenties) were the cult of the child, feminism of various kinds, the glorification of the negro (witness the work of Firbank, for instance), and the ever-present cult of homosexuality. As Horace Zagreus — one of Lewis’ voices in the novel — acidly points out: as far as Bloomsbury was concerned, heterosexuality was the love that dare not speak its name.

All of these putative forms of political correctness were held together by a rising generation whose most ‘advanced’ adherents were determined to let their hair down during the roaring ’20s. Indeed, the cloying, ormolu tainted facade of the super-rich — anatomized in this novel — only came to an end with the Great Crash, which burst at about the time of the novel’s appearance in 1930.

The semantics of the radical bourgeoisie have largely taken over the world — and what was anathema to mass or philistine opinion is now the normal chit-chat of the semi-educated to educated. Revolutionary bohemia — according to Lewis — proceeds in three stages. First you have the aristocratic version of it during the 1890s — the “naughty nineties,” the breaking of Oscar Wilde, etc., only for this stage to be followed by a mass bourgeois version of la Decadence in the 1920s. This makes way for the mass proletarianized version of bohemia which hits the world in the 1960s, after a few beatnik preliminaries the decade before. Lewis never lived to see this period, having died in 1957.

Another very interesting feature about Lewis’ prescience is his understanding of revolutionary ideology and its after-effects. For, as early as The Art of Being Ruled in 1926, Lewis was positing the notion that the emancipation of women to work would kill off the family far more effectively than all the feminist route-marches put together.

One of Lewis’ most extraordinary judgments is that many Marxian values, floating freely and slip-streaming their historical source, could make use of market capitalism to achieve their ends. This was an insight of such penetration and Chestertonian paradox in 1926 that it must have appeared half-insane.

Other ancillary positions which were part of this Super-structuralist ramp (sic) were the cult of the exotic and the Primitive in art, Child art and children’s rights, Psycho-analysis, and hostility to all prior forms.

The revolutionary thinker Bill Hopkins once said to me that one of the reasons for the obsession with primitivism in early modernism was a reaction to Western thought’s compartmentalization in the late nineteenth century. This led to a desire to kick against the pricks and develop contrary strategies of pure energy in the Arts. Whatever the truth about this, a hostility towards the martial past, nationalism, imperialism, race and empire — the entire rejection of Kipling’s Britain — was part-and-parcel of the Bloomsbury sensibility.

Nonetheless, it goes without saying that Lewis, the founder of the Vorticist movement inside modernism, saw modern art as a weapon in his battle against The Apes of God. In this regard Lewis was that very rare animal — a thoroughgoing modernist and a right-wing transvaluator of all values.

Interestingly, the idea of The Apes comes from the dilettantist perquisite of thousands of amateur painters, poets, sculptors, writers and the rest, themselves all part of a monied bohemia, who crowd out the available space for genuine creatives like himself. The cult of the amateur, however, would soon be replaced by the general melange of entertainment and the cultural industry which has probably stymied a great deal of post-war creation that Lewis never lived to see.

---

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/wyndham-lewis-the-apes-of-god/

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

By Jonathan Bowden

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/ 

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ^[2] is probably the most important political novel of the twentieth century, but the Trotskyite influence on it is under-appreciated. The entire thesis about the Party’s totalitarianism is a subtle mixture of libertarian and Marxist contra Marxism ideas. One of the points which is rarely made is how the party machine doubles for fascism in Orwell’s mind – a classic Trotskyist ploy whereby Stalinism is considered to be the recrudescence of the class enemy. This is of a piece with the view that the Soviet Union was a deformed workers’ state or happened to be Bonapartist or Thermidorean in aspect.

Not only is Goldstein the dreaded object of hatred — witness the Two-Minute hate — but this Trotsky stand-in also wrote the evil book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which the party defines its existence against. The inner logic or dialectic, however, means that the Inner Party actually wrote the book so that it would control the mainsprings of its own criticism.

One of the strongest features of Nineteen Eighty-Four is its use of what the novelist Anthony Burgess called “sense data.” These are all the unmentionable things — usually realities in the physical world — which make a novel physically pungent or real to the reader. This is the very texture of life under “real, existing socialism”: scraping oneself in the morning with a bar of old soap, the absence of razor blades, human hair blocking a sink full of dirty water; the unsanitary details of conformism, socialist commerce, and queuing which made the novel feel so morally conservative to its first readers. This and the depiction of the working class (or Proles), who are everywhere treated as socially degraded  beasts of burden. Some of the most fruity illustrations come from Winston Smith’s home flat in Victory mansions — the smell of cabbage, the horrid nature of the Parsons’ children, the threadbare and decrepit nature of everything, the continuous droning of the telescreen.

Most of these “sense data” are based on Britain in 1948. It is the reality of Wyndham Lewis’ Rotting Hill — a country of ration cards, depleted resources, spivdom, dilapidated buildings after war-time bombing, rancid food, restrictions, blunt razor blades, and almost continuous talk about Victory over the Axis powers. Britain’s post-war decline dates from this period when the national debt exceeded outcome by seven times — and this was before the joys of Third World immigration which were only just beginning. The fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four is just the conditions in Britain in 1948 — at the level of the senses — is a fact not widely commented on.

The uncanny parallels between Newspeak and political correctness are widely mentioned but not really analyzed — save possibly in Anthony Burgess’ skit 1985, a satire which majors quite strongly on proletarian or workers’ English — whereby every conceivable mistake, solecism, mispronunciation, or scatology is marked up; correct usage is everywhere frowned upon.

Another aspect of the novel which receives scant attention is its sexological implications. In most coverage of Nineteen Eighty-Four the party organization known as the Anti-Sex league is given scant attention. Yet Orwell had considerable theoretical overlaps with both Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — never mind Herbert Marcuse. Orwell’s thesis is that totalitarianism fosters a sexless hysteria in order to cement its power. The inescapable corollary is that more liberal systems promote pornography and promiscuity in order to enervate their populations.

Orwell certainly pin-pointed the arrant puritanism of Stalinist censorship — something which became even more blatant after the Second World War. One also has to factor in the fact that Orwell was living and writing in an era where importing James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were criminal offenses. Nonetheless, Orwell’s anti-puritanism and libertarianism, sexually speaking, is very rarely commented on. Perhaps this leads to the nakedly sexual rebellion of Winston’s and Julia’s affair against the Party. A series of actions for which the mock-Eucharist, the imbibing of bread and wine in O’Brien’s inner party office, will not give them absolution!

It might also prove instructive to examine the sequences of torment which Winston Smith has to undergo in the novel’s last third. This phase of the book is quite clearly Hell in a Dantesque triad (the introductory section in Victory Mansions and at the Ministry is Purgatory, and Heaven is the brief physical affair with Julia). In actual fact, well over a third of the novel is expended in Hell, primarily located in the fluorescent-lit cells of the Ministry of Love.

This is the period where O’Brien comes into his own as the party inquisitor or tormentor, an authorial voice in The Book, and a man who quite clearly believes in the system known as Ingsoc, English Socialism. He is a fanatic or true believer who readily concedes to the Party’s inner nihilism and restlessness: “you want an image of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping down on a human face forever.”

Moreover, the extended torture scene proceeds over a third of the novel’s expanse and was quite clearly too much for many readers — in north Wales, one viewer of the BBC drama in the mid-fifties dropped dead during the rat scene. I suppose one could call it the ultimate review! Questions were even asked in parliament about what a state broadcaster was spending its money on.

Nonetheless, O’Brien is quite clearly configured as a party priest who is there to enforce obedience to the secular theology of Ingsoc. (Incidentally, Richard Burton is superb as O’Brien in the cinematic version of the novel made in the year itself, 1984 ^[5].)

The point of the society is to leave the Proles to their own devices and concentrate entirely on the theoretical orthodoxy of both the inner and outer party members. In this respect, it resembles very much a continuation of the underground and Bohemia when in power. You get a whiff of this at the novel’s finale, with Winston ensconced in the Chestnut Tree cafe waiting for the bullet and convinced of his love for Big Brother.

This is the inscrutable face of the Stalin lookalike which stares meaningfully from a hundred thousand posters in every available public place. Might he be smiling under the mustache?

---

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/george-orwells-nineteen-eighty-four/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1984_movie_poster.jpg

[2] Nineteen Eighty-Four: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452284236/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=countercurren-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0452284236

[3] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/goldstein.jpg

[4] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/bigbrother.jpg

[5] 1984: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00007KQA3/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=countercurren-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=B00007KQA3

D. H. Lawrence on America

Derek HAWTHORNE

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

I 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.

It 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.

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love :
Anti-Modernism in Literature

Derek Hawthorne

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

D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel is also his most anti-modern. Written between April and October of 1916 in Cornwall, during some of the darkest days of the First World War, Women in Love was conceived as a sequel to The Rainbow. (Both novels were brilliantly filmed by Ken Russell.) Women in Love continues the story of Ursula Brangwen’s life, and the fulfillment she finds in a love affair with Rupert Birkin (who does not figure in The Rainbow at all). This relationship is, in fact, paired with another: that of Gudrun, Ursula’s sister (a very minor character in The Rainbow), and Gerald Crich, Birkin’s best friend. The novel follows the course of both relationships.

The connection between the two novels seems a tenuous one at best, however, and one can read and appreciate Women in Love without any knowledge at all of The Rainbow. This has a great deal to do with the dramatic difference in tone between the two. In a letter, Lawrence described the relationship between the two novels as follows: “There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love . . . this actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war; it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating.”

Women in Love is indeed “purely destructive”: it is grimly apocalyptic and misanthropic. There is little sense of the presence of nature this time: the novel moves almost entirely within the conscious and (more importantly) subconscious minds of its four main characters. And the backdrop is the ugly, human–built mechanicalness of the industrialized Midlands. It is easy to attribute the change in tone between the two novels as due to Lawrence’s horror at the war (“The war finished me,” he later said).

But one must not lose sight of the fact that the two novels do, in fact, tell one continuous story, and that the switch in tone is appropriate to what the second half of the story depicts: the fragmentary lives of individuals struggling to find fulfillment in the modern world. In his “Foreword” to the novel Lawrence wrote that it “took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.” For Lawrence, as for Heidegger, the war was ultimately just an inevitable extension of the industrial age itself.

At the beginning of the story, Birkin is involved in an unhappy love affair with Hermione Roddice, the daughter of an aristocrat and a thinly-disguised portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Birkin is already acquainted with Ursula professionally, as he is the local school inspector and she the school mistress. After they are brought closer together and love begins to grow between them, Birkin abandons Hermione. The memorable episode that precipitates the final break between them involves Hermione trying to bludgeon him to death with a lapis lazuli paperweight.

However, Birkin’s relationship with Ursula is, from the first, difficult in its own way. Much of the reason has to do with Birkin’s misanthropy and Schopenhauerian pessimism. At some level, Ursula sympathizes with Birkin’s views, but she is put off by his extraordinary vehemence, and, more importantly, seems to feel that if he would admit his love for her and fully surrender himself to their relationship he would be freed from his all-consuming hatred of the world. She is carrying on with life, in spite of everything, and eventually she succeeds in drawing him back into life.

The character of Rupert Birkin is universally acknowledged to be a self-portrait of Lawrence, though it would be dangerous to assume that Lawrence has no critical distance from the character (or from himself, for that matter). Nevertheless, Birkin often speaks for Lawrence. Early in the novel Birkin declares that it would be much better if humanity “were just wiped out. Essentially they don’t exist, they aren’t there.” Later, in conversation with Ursula, Birkin declares:

“Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing: they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! . . . It’s a lie to say that love is the greatest. . . . What people want is hate—hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love they get it. . . . If we want hate, let us have it—death, murder, torture, violent destruction—let us have it: but not in the name of love. But I abhor humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. . . .”

“So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?” said Ursula. . . .

“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And it really was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated and exulted. But still, she was dissatisfied with him.

If anything, in his own correspondence Lawrence goes further than Birkin. In a letter to his friend S. S. Koteliansky, dated September 4, 1916, while Lawrence was working on Women in Love, he declares:

I must say I hate mankind—talking of hatred, I have got a perfect androphobia. When I see people in the distance, walking along the path through the fields to Zennor, I want to crouch in the bushes and shoot them silently with invisible arrows of death. I think truly the only righteousness is the destruction of mankind, as in Sodom. . . . Oh, if one could but have a great box of insect powder, and shake it over them, in the heavens, and exterminate them. Only to clear and cleanse and purify the beautiful earth, and give room for some truth and pure living.

Where Women in Love is most interesting, however, is not in such outpourings of venom, but in Lawrence’s attempts to pinpoint why things have gone so disastrously wrong in the modern world. As have many other authors, Lawrence places a great deal of weight on the materialism and mechanism of industrialized modernity. Another, later, exchange between Birkin and Ursula is particularly revealing in this regard. The pair have just bought a chair at a flea market and Birkin states:

“When I see that clear, beautiful chair, and I think of England, even Jane Austen’s England—it had living thoughts to unfold even then, and pure happiness in unfolding them. And now, we can only fish among the rubbish-heaps for the remnants of their old expression. There is no production in us now, only sordid and foul mechanicalness.”

“It isn’t true,” cried Ursula, “Why must you always praise the past at the expense of the present? Really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—”

“It could afford to be materialistic,” said Birkin, “because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.”

But why did Jane Austen’s England have the power to be something else? And what else did it have the power to be? For the answers to these questions we must, in essence, look back to The Rainbow. Jane Austen’s England still preserved some connection to the land—a sense of belonging to nature. What England then had the “power to be” was nothing grand and idealistic: it had the power simply to be its natural self. The people of Jane Austen’s England made and enjoyed beautiful objects—but these objects were an ornament to a life lived in relative closeness to the earth.

In the industrialized world of 1916, however, objects are all that human beings have. The object of life itself becomes the production and acquisition of objects. This by itself cannot, of course, provide any sense of “meaning in life,” and to fill this void we have introduced idealism and given to our materialism a moral veneer: we are making Progress, alleviating hunger and disease and want, promoting equality, and in general perfecting ourselves and the world through the marriage of science and commerce.

Gerald Crich and the Mastery of Nature

In Women in Love the coupling of industrial materialism with idealism is personified by Birkin’s friend Gerald Crich, son of the local colliery owner. On the train together, the two men speak of the modern world: “So you really think things are very bad?” Gerald asks. “Completely bad,” Birkin responds. Throughout the novel, Gerald is drawn to Birkin, fascinated by the man and his notions—yet he is repelled by him at the same time, and frightened. He encourages Birkin to explain what he means, and Birkin obliges him:

“We are such dreary liars. Our idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness; life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary.”

But Gerald responds that he thinks the pianoforte represents “a real desire for something higher” in the collier’s life.

“Higher!” cried Birkin. “Yes. Amazing heights of upright grandeur. It makes him so much higher in his neighboring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighboring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion.”

Material things and the zeal for material things do not lift up the average man. They merely produce what Christopher Lasch aptly called “the culture of narcissism,” and what Wendell Berry has called a “consumptive culture.” One of the absurdities of modern life is the pretence that human beings who have been reduced to the level of mere consumers are somehow more “advanced” than their ancestors.

But aside from man the consumer, what of man the producer? After all, someone has to produce all those pianofortes. This is where men like Gerald come in. Birkin asks Gerald what he lives for. Gerald answers: “I suppose I live to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being. Apart from that, I live because I am living.” Ursula remarks to Gudrun that Gerald has “got go, anyhow” and Gudrun replies, “The unfortunate thing is, where does his go go to, what becomes of it?” Ursula suggests, jokingly, that it “goes in applying the latest appliances!” This remark, however, is truer than she supposes.

The most brilliantly-written chapter of Women in Love is “The Industrial Magnate,” in which Lawrence depicts Gerald’s mastery of the mine. Gerald spends the first few years of his adult life wandering aimlessly, but always in hearty, masculine fashion: living the wild life of a student, becoming a soldier, then an adventurer. Always with Gerald there was an overweening curiosity and a desire truly to master something—a desire which masks a real, inner feeling of helplessness and lostness. He finds his true calling in running the mine, for there he believes he has found the meaning of life:

Immediately he saw the firm, he realized what he could do. He had to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed. This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will. . . . There were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the earth. . . . He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted timeless, a Godhead in process.

By writing “Matter” with a capital M, Lawrence underscores the fact that for Gerald the mine is important not in itself but for what it represents. Gerald sees himself not merely as a colliery owner, but as a titanic being: a participant in the long, historical process of man’s divinization through the conquest of nature, now coming to full consummation in the industrial age.

But where has he gotten such ideas? Lawrence tells us that Gerald “refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university,” and that he “took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas, and ideas of reform.” It is plain that Gerald has been exposed to a great deal of German philosophy. In depicting Gerald’s outlook on life, Lawrence seems to be blending ideas and terminology from three German philosophers: Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Fichte and the Mastery of Nature

Lawrence writes that through Gerald’s domination of his will (or his ideals) over Matter “there was perfection attained, the will of mankind was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically contradistinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other?” The philosophy this is closest to is that of Fichte, though Lawrence is probably thinking of Hegel.

Fichte believed, essentially, that an objective world—an other standing opposed to ego—existed merely as an instrument for the expression of human will. Nature, or what Lawrence here calls “Matter,” exists as something that must be overcome and transformed by human beings according to human ideals. In doing so, human beings realize themselves. All of human history for Fichte, indeed all of reality, is the unending imposition of the ideal on the real, or the transformation of material otherness into an image of human will.

Even though Fichte’s philosophy, at first glance, appears to be something novel, in fact in a sense it is (and was) nothing new at all: it is the underlying metaphysics of modernity laid bare. In the modern world, again, human beings essentially relate to nature as raw material that must be forced to fit human designs or interests—or at best as a mere background for human action. Further, time is conceived in linear fashion and history as a movement from darkness to light, from primitivism to progressivism.

The humanism of the Renaissance becomes, in the modern period, anthropocentrism. Man is a titanic being without any natural superior, whose vocation is to better the world and other men. It is pointless to ask when, exactly, these modern attitudes took hold. In part, they are an outgrowth of Christian monotheism, which taught the idea that the earth and all its contents has been given to man by God for his exclusive use.

Renaissance humanism, which was in many ways a kind of neo-pagan revolt against Christianity, celebrated the ideal of man as Magus, and as a kind of mini-God here on earth. In part, though these Renaissance ideas were bound up with the revival of Hermetic occultism, they paved the way for the scientific revolution represented by men such as Francis Bacon.

By that point in history, belief—real belief—in the God of monotheism was dying, at least among the intelligentsia, who veered more and more toward abstract conceptions of divinity which had little to do with human life. God, in other words, had become irrelevant and human beings found themselves alone in this world that had been given to them for their mastery, with nothing watching from above. It was only a matter of time before man would declare himself God, as Fichte virtually does.

Hegel’s Idealism

Hegel took over Fichte’s ideas and, among other things, amplified them with a theological interpretation. God, for Hegel, is pure self-related Idea which becomes real and concrete in the world through human self-awareness—a self-awareness achieved primarily through the analysis and mastery of nature, as well as through art, religion, and philosophy.

Although Hegel insisted that he had not meant to make man God, a great many of his followers and detractors saw that this is precisely what his philosophy had done. The “young Hegelian” Ludwig Feuerbach saw this and in his influential work The Essence of Christianity (1841) declared that God was, in fact, nothing but an ideal projection of human consciousness, a stand-in, in fact, for humanity itself.

The Hegelian (or, perhaps, young Hegelian) element in Gerald’s metaphysics comes in when Lawrence tells us that Gerald found his “eternal and his infinite” in the endless cycle of machine production. God, as Hegel learned from Aristotle, is an eternal act. The never-ending cycles of modern, industrial production—the apex of man’s mastery of nature—becomes, for Gerald, God incarnate: “the whole productive will of man was the Godhead.”

Nietzsche, Hegel, and the End of History

What seems Nietzschean here is simply the insistence on Will. In allowing himself to be used as an instrument of the “productive will of man” Gerald believes that he is aggrandizing his own personal power. However, as I noted earlier, in believing so Gerald is deceiving himself, and in the end “the God-motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum” simply burns him away in a cold fire. However, there is more to Gerald’s Nietzscheanism than this.

The relation of Nietzsche to Hegel is a complex one, but it can be boiled down in the following way. Hegel believed that in the modern period history had, in effect, ended. This assertion seems nonsensical if we make the mistake of confusing history with time. Of course, Hegel did not think time had stopped. He merely believed that the story of mankind had come to an end in the modern age, because it was in the modern, post-Christian age that mankind came to realize its true nature as radically self-determining (and other-determining, as well). With this realization of radical human freedom, and the realization that man actualizes God in the world, Hegel believed that essentially all the important questions and controversies of human history had been answered. The destiny of man was to live in more or less liberal societies, under more or less democratic states, and to practice more or less humanistic versions of Christianity. And in this condition mankind would continue to exist and prosper.

For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the end of history meant the death of everything that ennobles the human race. Without anything to struggle over or to believe in so strongly that one would be willing to fight and die for it, humanity would sink to the level of what Nietzsche called the Last Man, Homo economicus: the man whose aspirations do not rise above material comfort, safety, and security. The only hope was the arrival of the Overman, who would create new values, new systems of belief, and initiate new conflicts among human beings. In short, the Overman would re-start history. Nietzsche’s writings, in their trenchant critique of all Western beliefs and values, can be seen as an attempt to actually hasten the collapse of the modern world and usher in the Overman.

Nietzsche’s Will to Power

Essentially, Gerald Crich represents the Nietzschean Overman—or at least someone who believes himself to be a Nietzschean Overman. Gerald, himself a “great blonde beast,” is riding the tiger by riding his employees, expressing his “will to power” through mastering the mines.  What Gerald doesn’t realize is that, in Nietzschean terms, he is merely, the instrument of will to power, expressing itself in the modern age as industrialism and mechanization. As Colin Milton has discussed at some length, this may actually indicate a confusion, or at least an inconsistency, in Lawrence’s understanding of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is explicitly invoked in the novel when Ursula identifies Gerald with “Wille zur Macht.” The episode which prompts this comment from her is one of the most famous in the novel. In the chapter “Coal Dust,” Ursula and Gudrun go for a walk, but when they come to the railway crossing have to stop to wait for the colliery train to pass. As they stand there, Gerald Crich trots up riding a “red Arab mare.” The mare is frightened by the locomotive and moves away from it, but Gerald forces her back again and again, cutting into her flesh with his spurs. Ursula is horrified and cries “No—! No—! Let her go! Let her go, you fool, you fool—!” Gudrun, on the other hand, is fascinated by Gerald’s show of brute force over the mare and cries out only as he rides away, “I should think you’re proud.” As we shall see, Gudrun is Gerald’s counterpart, a portrait of the other, purely destructive side of modern will.

The episode with the mare is a good example of Lawrence’s sometimes obvious, but very effective symbolism. The mare represents nature—any and all natural beings—forced into submission before the designs and mechanisms of modernity. There is no other way to bring nature into accord with modern unnaturalism, other than by force and sheer bullying. And so later on Ursula refers to “Gerald Crich with his horse—a lust for bullying—a real Wille zur Macht—so base, so petty.”

In his essay “Blessed are the Powerful” Lawrence remarks, “A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something despicable and detestable.” In short, in Women in Love Lawrence seems to understand Wille zur Macht as a kind a kind of egoistic self-aggrandizement. In fact, however, what Nietzsche teaches is the surrender to Wille zur Macht, as an impersonal force that expresses itself through us.

Interestingly, perhaps the clearest parallels to Gerald Crich’s philosophy of life, and Lawrence’s treatment of it, are two thinkers Lawrence knew nothing about when he wrote Women in Love: Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger, both of whom were strongly influenced by Nietzsche.

Spengler: Faustian Man and Technology

Spengler’s major work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) was published in 1918, two years after Lawrence first began working on Women in Love. According to Spengler, “Faustian man” creates a human world of artifacts and schemes not out of any economic motivation but rather out of a sheer desire for mastery.

However, Spengler believed that in the modern world, at the very height of his technological prowess, Faustian man has begun to decline. In Mensche und Technik (Man and Technics, 1932) Spengler argued that technology had, in effect, taken on a life of its own. In building a technological world, humanity has been caught in the logic and the inevitable course of technology itself.

Technology rapidly becomes indispensable and human beings find themselves unable to do without it. Technological problems inevitably require technological solutions, and the sheer amount of gadgetry that the average human has to be conversant with grows exponentially. Technology comes to dominate the economy, so that most people find themselves not just being served by technology but working most of their lives for its advancement. In short, Faustian man, who had originally created the machines, now comes to be ruled by them.

Gerald certainly presents us with a vivid portrait of Spengler’s Faustian man. Lawrence does not explicitly make anything like Spengler’s argument concerning technology, but something like it lies beneath the surface of Women in Love and some of his other writings. Certainly Lawrence conveys the idea that Gerald foolishly believes himself to be master of the machines. Lawrence writes, “It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he had to subjugate.”

The medium Lawrence refers to is technology. “And Gerald was the God of the machine, Deus ex Machina.” In Man and Technics, Spengler writes: “To construct a world for himself, himself to be God—that was the Faustian inventor’s dream, from which henceforth arose all projects of the machines, which approached as closely as possible to the unachievable goal of perpetual motion.” Of course, what Gerald doesn’t realize is that he is Spengler’s Faustian man caught in the trap: servant of that which he had created.

Ernst Jünger and the Gestalt of the Worker

Ernst Jünger’s promethean, Nietzschean philosophy of technology comes uncannily close to Gerald’s own ideas. Jünger’s views were forged on the battlefields of World War I, at the very same time Lawrence was writing Women in Love. The war affected both men profoundly, but in profoundly different ways. As I have already mentioned, much of the misanthropy and apocalyptic quality of Women in Love is to be attributed to Lawrence’s horror of the war and what it had reduced men to. Jünger himself regarded the war as horrifying, and his memoir of his days as a soldier, In Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel, 1920), is as frightening and chastening an account of war as has ever been written. For Jünger, as for Lawrence (and, later, Heidegger) the war was essentially a technological phenomenon.

However, Jünger came to believe that technology—including the technology of war—was, in effect, a natural phenomenon: the product of some kind of primal, expressive force not unlike Schopenhauer’s Will or Nietzsche’s Will to Power. The very title In Stahlgewittern suggests this understanding of things. Michael E. Zimmerman writes in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:

On the field of battle, [Jünger] experienced himself at times as a cog in a gigantic technological movement. Yet, unexpectedly, by surrendering himself to this enormous process, he experienced an unparalleled personal elevation and intensity which he regarded as authentic individuation. Generalizing from this experience, he concluded that the best way for humanity to cope with the onslaught of technology was to embrace it wholeheartedly. (Zimmerman, 49)

In Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932) Jünger heralded the coming of what Zimmerman calls his “technological Overman.” The productive power underlying all of reality shall body itself forth in the “Gestalt of the worker,” who is essentially a steely-jawed soldier on perpetual march to the technological transformation and mastery of nature. Zimmerman writes how

Jünger asserted that in the nihilistic technological era, the ordinary worker either would learn to participate willingly as a mere cog in the technological order—or would perish. Only the higher types, the heroic worker-soldiers, would be capable of appreciating fully the world-creating, world-destroying technological-industrial firestorm. (Zimmerman, 54–55)

This passage rather uncannily brings to mind Lawrence’s description of the effect that Gerald’s managerial style has on his workers. This is a crucially important passage and I shall quote it at length:

But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanized. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but their souls were satisfied.

One can see here that Lawrence seems to accept the Spengler-Jünger thesis that there is an inexorable logic to the modern, technological society and that a fundamental change has come over humanity which makes it possible for men to become servants of the machine. The passage above continues, “It was what they wanted, Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did.” Lawrence clearly believes that there is something inevitable about what human beings are becoming—but unlike Jünger he cannot embrace it. The Nietzschean-Jüngerian answer to modernity—to ride the tiger—is perhaps the best that one can do to harmonize oneself with the technological world and its apparent dehumanization. But Lawrence absolutely rejects it, and paints Gerald as a tragic, deluded figure. Why?  In answering this question, we confront Lawrence’s central objection to modernity.

History: Progressive of Cyclical?

In the deleted “Prologue” to Women In Love (which is interesting for a good many other reasons), Lawrence describes Birkin in the early days of his affair with Hermione as “a youth of twenty-one, holding forth against Nietzsche.” Yet when Lawrence introduces us to Birkin’s own views they seem strikingly Nietzschean. First, however, Lawrence describes how Birkin had studied education (and become a school inspector) under the influence of what seems unmistakably like a warmed-over Hegelianism:

He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which mankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

But Birkin quickly becomes disillusioned with this vision, and responds to it in true Nietzschean fashion:

But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.

What is Nietzschean here is Birkin’s conviction that he is living at the end of history—but, contra Hegel, it is a time of disintegration and decay. However, unlike Nietzsche and his followers (including Gerald), Lawrence and Birkin do not see any way to transmute this situation into something that becomes life-advancing. What Gerald cannot see, but Birkin and Lawrence clearly can, is that the submission of the miners to “the Gestalt of the worker” represents the first stage in the complete breakdown of the Western world. The same passage quoted earlier from “The Industrial Magnate” chapter continues:

[Gerald] was just ahead of [his workers] in giving them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of chaos.

Submission to or mastery of the modern, technological world—whether that world represents an advance or a degeneration—is not the answer for Lawrence because he believes that true human fulfillment lies in submission to something higher, or perhaps deeper: the true unconscious. Gerald offers his miners a kind of “freedom,” but it is the illusory freedom of the mind and ego from the call of the natural self.

Essentially, for Lawrence, the modern world is characterized by the subordination of the organic to the mechanical; of the natural to the planned, automated, and “rational.” But in severing the tie to the organic and placing themselves in the service of the machine and the idea, human beings lose their fundamental being, and their sense of having a place in the cosmos.

The real problem with Nietzsche is that although he talks a great deal about the body and about “instincts,” everything for him is still, to borrow Lawrence’s language, “in the head.” In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche presents us with an attractive discussion of the healthy, “natural” morality of the master type, which values such things as health, strength, and beauty.

But Nietzsche’s own approach to morals amounts to a conscious and willful desire to relativize all values—to declare that there is no natural source, and no natural values. The Overman, in fact, gets to simply posit new values. This appears to be a purely intellectual, and largely arbitrary affair. The idea of “creating” values is psychologically implausible: how can anyone believe in, let alone fight for, values and ideals that they have consciously dreamed up?

The Impotent Übermensch

In his characterization of Gerald Crich, Lawrence gives us a realistic portrait of what would become of an “Overman” in real life. Keep in mind that it is Lawrence’s belief that when we abstract ourselves from the natural world, and from the promptings of the nature within us, we suffer and even, in a way, go mad. This is, in effect, what becomes of Gerald. In the concluding passages of the “Industrial Magnate” chapter Lawrence describes the psychological toll that mastery of Matter has taken on Gerald:

And once or twice lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. . . . He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask.

Inevitably, Gerald’s sense of dissociation displays itself in a sexual manner:

He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. . . . The devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women nowadays. He didn’t care about them anymore. . . . No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any more. He felt that his mind needed acute stimulation, before he could be physically roused.

The clear suggestion is that Gerald is practically impotent. Like Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose impotence has a purely physical cause, Gerald is physically numb; he lives from the mind alone. Disconnected from his natural being, he no longer feels spontaneous, animal arousal for the opposite sex. He has become “re-wired,” so to speak, so that the route to the sexual center, in his case, is by way of the intellect; he can only become sexually aroused through his mind.

The irony here is that Gerald is portrayed throughout the novel as handsome, strong, and virile in both a physical and spiritual sense: he is a master of matter, and of women. In fact, however, both his physical and spiritual virility is mere appearance. He is master neither of himself nor of his world. Nor is he even master of his erection. On the other hand, Birkin, who is portrayed as physically weaker, is at least truly virile in a spiritual sense. This is the reason he manages to avoid becoming “absorbed” by Ursula.

Lawrence is famous for characterizing relations between the sexes as a battle, or, more accurately, a struggle unto death. In Women in Love, the two couples battle each other continuously, but most of the fighting is done by the women against the men. (The famous nude wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin is a purely honest, physical contest, whose only psychological undertones are homoerotic.)

Birkin compromises with Ursula in settling for love rather than something “higher.” But despite this he maintains his integrity and individuality. It is a difficult feat, and even at the novel’s end we see Ursula working to try and undermine his desire for another kind of love in his life: “Aren’t I enough for you?” she asks him.

Gerald, however, cannot pull it off. He lacks Birkin’s spiritual virility: his ability to maintain himself, inviolate, even in giving himself to a woman. Gurdrun’s onslaughts are much more destructive and insidious than Ursula’s, and in the end the “manly” Gerald is broken by them.

Gudrun Brangwen, the Modern Woman

Gerald Crich is only one half of Lawrence’s portrait of the “modern individual.” The other half is Gudrun Brangwen. Of course, Birkin and Ursula are modern individuals, though in a different sense. The latter couple are both seeking some fulfilling way to live in, or in spite of, the modern world. They (especially Birkin) have achieved some critical distance from it.

Gerald and Gudrun, however, are both creatures of modernity. Gerald has consciously embraced the modern rootless prometheanism; Gudrun unconsciously. Further, Gudrun is not simply a female version of Gerald. Her “modernity” consists in certain traits which complement those of Gerald. What complicates matters is that Ursula and Gudrun also represent, for Lawrence, the two halves of femininity, and not just modern femininity.

In the first chapter of the novel, Gudrun reacts with revulsion to one of the locals as she and Ursula walk through Beldover: “A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her.” It is interesting to compare this with Birkin’s (and Lawrence’s) fantasies of annihilation. Birkin, the complete misanthrope, wants to wipe the earth clean of humanity, including himself, so that there is only “uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.” In Gudrun’s fantasy, she is left sitting up and everyone else is wiped away.

This small detail gives us an important clue to Gudrun’s character, which is fundamentally egoistic. A thoroughgoing egoism is always nihilistic, for it wills that all limitation or opposition to the ego be cancelled. But even the mere existence of other human beings (or anything else, for that matter) constitutes a limitation on the ego.

Just as Lawrence does with Gerald, this “self-assertion” on Gudrun’s part is connected, by allusion, with Nietzsche. This time, however, the allusion is put into the mouth of the character herself in what seems on the surface like a purely innocent remark. Enjoying the snowy Tyrol, Gudrun exclaims, “Isn’t the snow wonderful! Do you notice how it exalts everything? It is simply marvellous. One really does feel übermenschlich—more than human.”

Like Gerald, Gudrun lives in a state of abstraction from the body and from nature. In sex she remains perfectly detached. Writing of the aftermath of Gudrun’s first sexual encounter with Gerald, Lawrence emphasizes again and again her full consciousness, while Gerald lays on top of her, asleep and satiated. He tells us “she lay fully conscious.” And: “Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.” And: “She was suspended in perfect consciousness—and of what was she conscious?” (He does not truly answer the question.)

Gudrun is revolted by the rhythms of nature and by natural objects—even though, ironically, it is small animals that she depicts in her sculpture (perhaps this is the only way she can encounter them, as things she molds and creates herself). Holding Winifred Crich’s pet rabbit Bismarck, who puts up quite a struggle, “Gudrun stood for a moment astounded by the thunderstorm that had sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came over her like a cloud. . . . Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness and bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her.”

The mechanical succession of day after day revolts her. Very early in the novel she confesses to Ursula, “I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.” She looks at Ursula, who is clearly flustered by this, with a “mask-like expressionless face.” When Ursula, intimidated by her sister, stammers out a reply, “A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want to be too definite.” This desire to remain indefinite is essential to Gudrun’s character.

In fact, the essence of Gudrun is nothingness. In the first chapter, Lawrence tells us “there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.” In conversation with Gerald, Birkin describes her as a “restless bird,” and says that “She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her from taking it seriously—she must never be too serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won’t give herself away—she’s always on the defensive. That’s what I can’t stand about her type.” Gudrun’s “type” is the modern individual who cannot stand to be tied to anything, who is in constant flux, wary of anything that would compel her to make a commitment, whether to a relationship or a career, or whatever. Plato in the Republic essentially winds up describing this modern type when he attempts to characterize the sort of character produced by a democracy:

“Then,” [said Socrates], “he also lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing; now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him; and if he ever admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction; and if it’s money-makers, in that one. And there is neither order nor necessity in his life, but calling this life sweet, free, and blessed, he follows it throughout.”

“You have,” [said Adeimantus], “described exactly the life of a man attached to the law of equality.”

Near the end of the novel, Lawrence tells us of Gudrun:

Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. . . . Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And to-day was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm—pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.

She did not want things to materialize, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion.

When Gudrun is asked the question wohin? (where to?) Lawrence tells us that “She never wanted it answered.”

The quintessential modern individual does not, in fact, want to be anything at all, for to be something definite would close off other possibilities. And so the modern individual is always oriented toward the future, which contains all possibilities, rather than toward the present. In this respect, Gudrun’s character perfectly complements Gerald’s. Gerald has completely abstracted himself from the present by regarding everything else as “Matter” to be transformed according to his will.

This is, again, what Heidegger tells us is the modern perspective on nature. Because everything is merely raw material to be made over into something else, nothing is ever regarded as possessing a fixed identity. The essence of everything, really, is to become something else, something better. The being of things is thus something projected into the future; something that will be revealed at a later date, through human ingenuity. The result of this treatment of things as raw material is that it produces individuals who live for the future: for what will be, and for what they will be. This is how “abstraction” from the present occurs. A key ingredient in this, of course, is a kind of radical subjectivism and anthropocentrism: the being of things is something that will be created by human beings.

The modern world is therefore a world of individuals who are, mentally, quite literally elsewhere. On the one hand they are disconnected from the nature world (which to them is essentially “stuff”) and from their own nature, which they erroneously believe is something they can decide on or even re-make. They are disconnected, in fact, from presentness in general.

At one point Lawrence reveals to us that Gudrun suffers from the nagging feeling that she is merely an “onlooker” in life whereas her sister is a “partaker.” Indeed she is an onlooker and this is the key to her weird “consciousness” in the sex act. Gerald is an onlooker too, hence the sense of unreality he experiences when looking at himself in the mirror. They are both creatures of the mind, of idealism, and of futurity.

And this is truly the heart of Lawrence’s critique of modernity: that we have lost touch with the sense of being a part of nature, and of being in our bodies, in present time. The ultimate result of such abstraction from nature, the body, and the present is the destruction of nature, of any possibility of inner peace and fulfillment, and of community.

Both Gerald and Gudrun are fundamentally destructive, nihilating individuals, but of the two Gudrun represents destruction in its purest form. Gerald destroys in order to transform and, as we saw earlier, he believes himself to be an agent of history and of social reform. (Or, at least, this is the moral veneer he paints over his activities.) With Gudrun, there is not such self-justification. Of course, ultimately Gerald’s transformation of Matter is perfectly destructive, and so one can plausibly claim that in a sense Gudrun is the more honest of the two, though she is not self-aware in her destructiveness.

Gudrun represents the inner truth of Gerald’s prometheanism laid bare. This point is conveyed through the structure of Lawrence’s novel itself. Gudrun is a presence throughout the entire book, but by the last few chapters the story becomes focused very much on her. And it is in the last few chapters that the pure nihilism of her character is brought to the fore. At the same time, Gerald, who had earlier been a relatively strong figure, is reduced to inefficacy and becomes almost a shadowy presence. His physical death comes, in way, as merely an outward expression of an internal death that had already taken place in his soul.

Gudrun and Loerke

What seems to immediately precipitate Gerald’s suicide is that Gudrun gives every indication of leaving him for an artist named Loerke who she has met in the Tyrol. Loerke, better than Gerald, personifies Jünger’s promethean modernism. Loerke is a sculptor who shares with Gudrun and Ursula his plans for a granite frieze for a huge factory in Cologne. Churches, he tells the two sisters are “museum stuff,” and since the world is now dominated by industry, not religion, art should come together with industry to make the modern factory into a new Parthenon:

“And do you think then,” said Gudrun, “that art should serve industry?”

“Art should interpret industry as art once interpreted religion,” he said. . . .

“But is there nothing but work—mechanical work?” said Gudrun.

“Nothing but work!” he repeated, leaning forward, his eyes two darknesses, with needle-points of light. “No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all. . . .”

Loerke exhibits the same destructive, modern will we find in Gerald and Gudrun, but come to full consciousness of itself. This is what attracts Gudrun to Loerke. She has realized that Gerald is weak—he possesses the destructive will, but cannot own up to it; he must hide it under his idealism. Loerke has embraced the Will to Power without illusion:

To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work.

Birkin describes him a bit later as “a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.” Loerke is completely detached from nature and from the body. His sexuality is indeterminate. Though he has a male lover, he is drawn to Ursula. But he tells her that it wouldn’t matter to him if she were one hundred years old: all that matters is her mind.

The Gudrun-Gerald relationship plays itself out, and reaches its tragic end, in the Alps. The choice of locations is significant. Attentive readers of Lawrence’s fiction will note that he tends to depict his characters as either “watery” or “fiery.” In Women in Love Birkin and Ursula are the fiery pair, contrasted to Gudrun and Gerald, who are watery. Gerald meets his end in the novel when he commits suicide by wandering off into the snow and freezing to death. For Lawrence, this act represents Gerald quite literally “returning to his element.” Though Gudrun and Ursula are bound together by blood, the deeper bond is between Gudrun and Gerald, and it is metaphysical. They are the two aspects of the modern soul: one productive without a purpose; the other destructive, nihilating.

Ursula’s Primacy

In a sense it is strange to argue as I did earlier that Women in Love represents the continuation of Ursula’s story. For one thing, the novel seems to focus more directly on the Birkin-Gerald relationship. Further, Gudrun is actually a more vivid character than Ursula. Nevertheless, I would still argue that Ursula is the central character. She is the most “natural” of any major character in the novel; the least in conflict with herself.

We are made to feel closer to Birkin, as he is transparently Lawrence’s self-portrait. But Birkin is “abstracted” from life in his own way. He berates Hermione for having everything in her head and lacking real sensuosity. Yet so much of Birkin is theory and talk. He wants some kind of total, transformative experience that would give him a real sense of being alive—yet he wants to hold onto his ego boundaries. He wants love, but then again he doesn’t. He wants to give himself to Ursula, but not totally. Admirers of Lawrence the man often miss the rather obvious flaws in Birkin’s character, and are thus oblivious to how Lawrence may have achieved a critical distance from Birkin (and from himself).

In the end, Birkin’s “problems” are in large measure solved by the oldest means in the world: the force of natural love, and the institution of marriage. Up to a point (but only up to a point) Birkin simply surrenders his abstract ideas about relationships—about finding something “more” than love—and surrenders to Ursula. Ursula knows from deep within herself, the falsity of Birkin’s ideals. Through her he comes to know what Lawrence would call “the sweetness of accomplished marriage.” There is only one part of him that remains unfulfilled. But that is a subject for another essay . . .

D. H. Lawrence's Critique of Modernity

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

Derek HAWTHORNE

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

1. 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

2. Industrialism, the Midlands, and Lawrence’s “Socialism”

Lawrence 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.

George Steiner’s
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.

Jonathan BOWDEN

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

George Steiner
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999

George Steiner’s novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., was published about three decades back and encodes a large number of the author’s non-fiction books which were released beforehand. This is especially pertinent to the analysis published in In Bluebeard’s Castle, for instance.

For our purposes in this review, the dramatic or theatrical presentation of Steiner’s brief work is almost as important as the text itself. It was dramatized (the only one of the Professor’s works to be treated in this way) by the socialist playwright Christopher Hampton and, on a personal note, I actually saw it in 1981–82.

The drama starred Alec McCowen as Adolf Hitler in a production which lasted around an hour and a half. He was later awarded the Evening Standard theater award for his riveting performance — particularly his oracular testimony or speech at the play’s close. The critical record suggests that it was performed at the Mermaid Theatre, but I seem to recall seeing it at the Riverside studios in west London. I went with a girl that I was rather keen on at the time, but she was nauseated by the whole thing and fell asleep.

To cut to the chase: I believe that this is largely a work by and about George Steiner rather than the personalities or historical personages with whom he deals. Steiner is an “ultra-civilized” liberal, a polyglot, and an Encyclopaedist who has made a personal or subjective religion out of Western high culture. His play — and the short novel which gave it birth — are his attempts to deal with the fact that no matter how knowledgeable or assimilated he becomes he always remains an outsider . . . an Ashkenazic amongst Gentiles.

What differentiates Steiner from most of his group is that he has not chosen to identify himself with the major pathways that various vanguards usually choose. Not for him, in other words, the ways of commerce, gross materialist accumulation or gain; militant leftism or anti-system revolt; or active and intentional Zionism.

The elements in the play which appear shocking, “transgressive,” non-humanitarian, anti-Zionist, and even “self-hating” in Jewish terms, are quite understandable when you reckon on Steiner’s own sensibility. A pure intellectual who incarnates the mind-body split, Steiner actively dislikes Israel, Ashkenazic enthusiasm, and the normalcy, almost semi-Gentile qualities, of nationalism and group adherence. Like an ultra-liberal in the West, an active vision of Hell would be national service in the armed forces — that is, having to endure the relative crudity, non-sophistication, and “political incorrectness” of all and sundry. Steiner, in other words, wishes to assimilate on his own terms — most of which are basically specific to himself.

His culture is actually quite a small sliver of land that articulates the integrative energies of mid-European Jews from around 1880 to 1940. For him, authors like Karl Kraus, Kafka, and Paul Celan are European culture tout court. Likewise, a special endorsement will always be given to those superior Gentiles and cultural creators (Goethe, Tolstoy, Beethoven, and so forth) who make ready the path of assimilation through humane artistry.

In a manner which is typical of the radical liberals who dominate the cultural space in the West today, Steiner is truly horrified by Man’s brutality, ferocity, hatred, and capacity for endless sadism. A keen dualist, many of Steiner’s books contain long, anguished discourses about the Marquis de Sade, for example. De Sade, in gigantic works of megalomania like The 120 Days of Sodom, is rarely pithy or gnomic. But one of his remarks bears recording: when he declares that civilisation is an exercise in cruelty which has been tempered by disquiet. Steiner’s whole career is a protest against this assertion; yet, as a liberal pessimist, he doubtless secretly agrees with it.

To return to the play proper, however . . . the whole point of the narrative is to prepare for the enormous speech by the McCowan figure at the piece’s end. It is relatively typical for a creator like Steiner that he loves to hate Hitler and, in all honesty, his view of the German dictator is very similar to that of Norman Mailer in his last published novel shortly before his death. Both of them see Hitler as not a man at all but a force, a hypostatization, a recognition of the absence of the real — even an incarnation of terror, implacability, and death.

In this regard, but in no other, they actually engage in transgression and cross over to the other side . . . if only momentarily. Neither of these mild apostates can really be accused of shoah revisionism or its historical counterpart — by dint of identifying with the discourse of Harry Elmer Barnes. Not one bit of it . . . but they do, luridly, hesitantly, mesmerically (even lambently) become cultural revisionists just for a moment before snapping back into their a priori positions. This would amount to a post-existential and “left” conservative in Mailer’s case; a pained, enervated, diaphanous and painfully raw (or thin-skinned) “rootless cosmopolitan” in Steiner’s.

The piece itself, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., is essentially front-end loaded. It only really exists as a prop or attainment for Hitler’s great speech at the end. Some of the work’s Zionist or Ashkenazic critics who said that it was poorly constructed or slightly slung together actually have a point — yet what they miss is the deux ex machina moment. This amounts to the aporia in language — the moment of apocalypse at the finale — when a demi-god of inversion (literally an Anti-Christ) is permitted to orate. Steiner was classically educated by his father to a very high level . . . it has to be admitted. But one of his mental conceits is that Greek tragedy, even genuine tragedy without the Grecian overlay, is impossible at this time. He wrote an entire early book called The Death of Tragedy which is essentially on this theme. Nonetheless, I believe in delving a little bit deeper here.

The book itself is a bit of a rag-bag, primarily due to the fact that everything is fed towards (rather impatiently) getting to the end. This is the moment of high Greek drama, the play within the play which signifies the instant when the trial of Hitler begins, and that essentially resembles a playlet within a play. The main purpose of a narrative which runs for a hundred pages or so is to get all of the important characters on stage. Some of this is uneasily handled, and a good deal of it reads like some middle-brow thriller writers from the ’sixties and ’seventies, such as Hammond Innes or Aleister MacClean.

The dramatis personae are Emmanuel Lieber, the Nazi hunter and instigator of events, Simeon (the presiding judge at Hitler’s mock-trial) and search-party leader, as well as a young Israelite Isaac Ansell (who represents the post-war generation); and Elie Barach, an Orthodox Jew whose faith is disturbed by Benasseraf’s dream. He is the holy fool of the group — the Fool or Tom o’ Bedlam figure, if you like. For Benasseraf is mildly mentally ill, suffers flash-backs, and casts an alternative light on things. He even serves the dissentient role of an esoteric Hitlerist — albeit in reverse order.

There are two Gentile characters (other than Hitler). These are John Asher (who is half-Jewish); and who Steiner basically considers to be Gentile. Like all radical liberals, Steiner is overly-drawn to the other. He evinces quite a lot of sympathy for this character and possibly identifies with him. Asher is fascinated by the whole affair, but not pruriently. He suffers from no metaphysical lusts. The other Gentile is Teku, a Latino Indian or an indigenous South American . . . he is probably conceived as a largely silent witness to the trial, an incarnation of Mankind looking on.

As I say, the real purpose of the narration is to get these characters together so that the trial can occur. The elderly figure of Hitler (played by McCowan) has no real role until the trial sequence commences. When this happens he brushes aside any rudimentary defence apparatus provided by the “court” and represents himself. The whole point of the novella is really this trial.

The Hitler figure defends himself with vigor and urgency, irrespective of the fact that it’s obviously not a real court case. The point here is philosophical, semi-religious, and higher in tone or intent. The whole event is primarily metaphysical in aspect — and Hitler defends himself metaphysically. Once Hitler emerges in Steiner’s sequence, and despite his great age, he effortlessly dominates the scenario and virtually all the other characters lose their reality.

Hitler is really conceived of as being intimately connected to the Jewish destiny, so much so that he appears to be a part of their very development. To Steiner, he is no longer a man but an anti-god; a personal Satan not for mankind at large like the devil in Christianity or Islam. No. He is an Israelite devil; a Loki, a sprite of destruction — almost the pagan anti-god for one particular people, namely his own.

Throughout all of this we have to remember that Steiner is an uneasy co-optee; he doesn’t really identify with his people that much . . . like most liberals. He admires the “hard” jews and Israelis in his plot device — the men who have hunted down the Great Beast (666) — but he doesn’t really share their passions. Unlike all of them (to varying degrees) he is not a nationalist; he strives not to allow himself group emotions.

Nonetheless, a peculiar thing occurs during Hitler’s great speech (performed by McCowan) and which is quite reminiscent of the Bailiff’s endless oratory in The Childermass (a novel by Wyndham Lewis which I have reviewed elsewhere on this site). The leftist and Zionist critics who loathed this short book (as well as the play that came out of it via Hampton’s redaction) do have a point. Hitler is the genius; they are underlings. Like the malevolent Anglo-Irish landowner, Pozzo, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, he has the power. Steiner knows this, wills it. and lets it happen. At the deepest possible level, so to say, Steiner is a masochist who worships and adores Hitler as a negative god, albeit filtered and sublimated through aesthetic inversions (the catalog of which is multiple). In this moment of post-Christianity, he is truly a Satanist.

The arguments which Steiner/Hitler uses are less important than the way it is delivered. Hitler is not a man but a force; a diabolical instantiation; the encomium of the Word turned around. He is an avatar; an Odin in a rival religion to the one which Steiner was brought up in (Judaism) and has rejected subsequently. Like most academics with tenure, he’s an Enlightenment man now.

It has to be said that in McCowan’s dark threnody one comes close to a species of black metal or cacophonic white power music — of a sort that Professor Goodrick-Clarke tabulated, with little overt criticism, in Black Sun. Steiner agrees — in a fragmentary moment or a semiotic register — with everything that Savitri Devi has ever said about the Führer, but he does so as an instant of nausea and ontological victimhood. Albeit raised to a high artistic level, it is a cosmicism whereby the liberal-minded victim of a street mugging forgives his attacker, even thinks it was justified.

None of the arguments the Hitler character uses are original; moral and historical relativism; together with the fact that many Orthodox Rabbis believe Hitler to have been part of God’s plan — i.e., to whip the chosen people for transgressing from the divine path of allegedly being Man’s beacon. A role which involves waiting for the coming of Jehovah and his messiah . . . Might Hitler have been him — in the way that a sect like Jews for Jesus believe that Christians have a point?

Steiner leaves these questions unanswered, but to my mind this secularist sees Hitler as a savage god — much like Stasinopolous’ view of Picasso, but more importantly. The only way out of Steiner’s dilemma is to attempt a caveat — and Nietzsche comes to his aid here. For in a pagan (Gentile) world Steiner believes that Jews are being punished for inventing conscience. This, although complicated, and passim. Nietzsche’s Geneaology of Morals, is Nietzsche’s understanding of anti-semitism as a metaphysical postulate. Didn’t he partly reject Christianity as the judaicisation of European gentility?

In any event, Steiner achieves an artistic madness here — in his own terms — that reminds one of Hans Prinzhorn’s Art of the Insane. Where, following on from the manner of Kafka in Metamorphosis, the mild-mannered insurance salesman, Gregor, transforms into a gigantic cockroach overnight. It is the ultimate Hieronymous Bosch morphology or curdling, and at the end of the rival novella the roach-man just dies. He lowers his head plus mandibles (so to speak) for the last time and gradually his epidermis or shell gets closer and closer to the carpet. Finally, he expires — all passion spent. It is the post-facticity of degeneration; the world-weariness, sadness in the face of Man’s nature, and masochism which lurks at Humanism’s heart. It, to switch one’s foray into entomology, involves the endless circling of a moth around the candle-flame which will devour it.

Professor Steiner seeks cessation; a Heideggerian full-stop: he wishes to flop down and worship the Black Sun.

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

Derek HAWTHORNE

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

1. Love and Strife

In 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.

In 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.

Having 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.

What 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.

Make no mistake, Lawrence believes that women can adopt the ways of men; he believes that they can succeed at traditionally male work. But he believes that they do this at great cost to themselves. “Of all things, the most fatal to a woman is to have an aim,” Lawrence tells us. In general, he believes that the ultimate aim of life is simply living, and that we set a trap for ourselves when we declare that some goal or some ideal shall be the end of life, and believe that this will make life “meaningful.” This applies to men, but even more so to women. Why? Because, again, women are so much closer to the source that men tend to regard women as the life force embodied (“Mother Nature”). For a woman to live for something other than living is to pervert her nature, and her gift. Again, Lawrence’s position is not that a woman is incapable of doing the work of a man, but ultimately she will find it deadening: “The moment woman has got man’s ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world—there’s an end of it. She’s had enough. She’s had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced.”

In our age, many women who have forgone marriage and children in order to pursue a career are discovering this. The body has its own needs and ends, and the organism as a whole cannot flourish and achieve satisfaction unless these needs and ends are satisfied. With some exceptions, women who have chosen not to have children regret it, and suffer in other ways as well (for example, they are at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than women who have given birth). The same goes for men, many of whom spend a great many “productive” years without feeling a need to reproduce–then are suddenly hit by that need and launch themselves on a frantic, sometimes worldwide search for a suitable mate able to father them a child. Lawrence wrote the following, prophetic words in one of his final essays:

It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency—suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!

This quote suggests that Lawrence believes that the woman, the hen, ruins herself by taking up the ways appropriate and natural for the cock – but this is not exactly what he means. In Lawrence’s view, the modern ways of the cock are destroying the cock as well, but they are doubly bad for the hen. What’s bad for the gander is worse for the goose. Lawrence believes that in order to achieve satisfaction in life, we must get in touch with that primal self that the woman is fortunate enough always to be closer to.

4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman

So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?

Lawrence has a great deal to say on this subject, but one of his oft-repeated recommendations essentially amounts to saying that relations between the sexes should be severed. By this he means that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other. In a 1925 letter he writes, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.”

In order for men and women to be friends, they must deliberately put aside or suppress their sexual identities and their very different natures. They must actively ignore the fact that they are men and women. They relate to each other, in effect, as neutered, sexless beings. They can never truly relax around each other, for they must continually monitor the way that they look at each other or (more problematic) touch each other. Sitting in too close proximity could awaken feelings that neither wants awakened. If, with respect to their “daytime selves,” men and women are forced to relate to each other in this way regularly, it has the potential of wrecking the ability of the “nighttime self” to relate to the opposite sex in a natural, sensual manner. Once accustomed to the daily routine of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and taking great care never to show a sexual side to their nature, these habits carry over into the realm of the romantic and sexual. Dating and courtship become fraught with tension, each party unsure of the “appropriateness” of this or that display of sexual interest or simple affection. The man, in short, becomes afraid to be a man, and the woman to be a woman. “On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being ‘pals,’ they lose their own male and female integrity.” Writing of the modern marriage, Wendell Berry states

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

If we must suppress our masculine and feminine natures in order to be friends with the opposite sex, in what way then do we actually relate to each other? We relate almost entirely through the intellect. Lawrence writes, “Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are ‘pals.’” And: “We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer.” Modern men and women begin their relationships as sexless things who relate through ideas and speech. The man looks for a woman, or the woman for a man who thinks and talks as they do; who “knows where they are coming from,” and has “similar values.” They might as well not have bodies at all, or conduct the initial stages of their relationships by telephone or email. Indeed, that is exactly the way many modern relationships are now beginning. But the primary way men and women are built to relate to each other is through the body and the signals of the body; through the subtle, sexual “vibrations” that each gives off, through the sexual gaze (different in the male and in the female), and through touch. No real, romantic relationship can be forged without these, and without feeling through these non-mental means that the two are “right” for each other. We cannot start with “mental agreement” and then construct a sexual relationship around it.

Lawrence, like Rousseau, had a good deal to say about education, and in fact much of what he says is Rousseauian. His ideas on the subject are expressed chiefly in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in a long essay, “The Education of the People.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled “First Steps in Education,” Lawrence lays out a new program for educating girls and boys: “All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art. . . . All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labour, or of technical industry, or of art.” The difference between how boys and girls are to be educated (at least initially) is that whereas both are required to attend a “domestic workshop,” only boys are required to attend a “workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art.” Keep in mind that Lawrence is laying down the rules for education in his ideal society. He anticipates that whereas all males will work outside the home (in some fashion or other), not all females will. His system is not designed to force women into the role of homemakers, for he leaves it open that girls may, if they choose, learn the same skills as boys. As to higher education, Lawrence leaves this open: “Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree.” The system is designed in such a way that individuals are drawn to pursue certain avenues based on their personalities and natural temperaments. Unlike our present society, in Lawrence’s world there would be no universal pressure to attend university: only individuals with certain natural gifts and inclinations would go in that direction. Similarly, the system leaves open the possibility that some women will pursue the same path as men, but only if that is their natural inclination. The intent of Lawrence’s program is not to force individuals into certain roles, but to cultivate their natural, innate characteristics. And as we have seen, Lawrence believes that males and females are innately different.

Lawrence makes it clear elsewhere that in the early years education will be sex-segregated. This is intended to facilitate the development of each student’s character and talents. Males, especially early in life, relate more easily to other males and are better able to devote themselves to their studies in the absence of females. The same thing applies to females. Sex-segregated education in the early years also has the advantage, Lawrence believes, of promoting a healthier interaction between males and females later on. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he states, “boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally.” After all, “You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.”

But this is, of course, all in the realm of fantasy. Lawrence’s system would be practical, if modern society could be entirely restructured, and he is aware that this is not likely to occur anytime soon. So what are we to do in the meantime? Here we encounter some of Lawrence’s most controversial ideas, and most inflammatory prose. He writes, “men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.” It is this sort of thing that has made Lawrence a bête noire of feminists. Yet, in the next sentence, he adds “Wives, do the same to your husbands.” Lawrence’s intention, as always, is to destroy the ego-centredness in both husband and wife; to destroy the modern tendency for men and women to relate to each other, and to themselves, through ideas and ideals.

As a man and a husband, however, he writes primarily from that standpoint: “Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she’s stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.” Does he mean any of this literally? Is he advocating that husbands beat their wives? Perhaps. Lawrence and Frieda were famous for their quarrels, which often came to blows, though the blows were struck by both. Lawrence states the purpose of such “beatings” (whether literal or figurative) as follows: “Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she’s got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious.”

As we have already seen, Lawrence believes that healthy relations between a man and a woman depend largely on the man’s ability to make the woman believe in him, and the purpose he has set for himself in life. Sex unites the “nighttime self” of men and women, but the daytime self can only be united, for Lawrence, through the man’s devotion to something outside the marriage, and the woman’s belief in the man. This is just the same thing as saying that what unites the lives of men and women (as opposed to their sexual natures) is the woman’s belief in the man and his purpose. And so Lawrence writes:

You’ve got to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. . . . She’ll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She’ll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. . . . Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. . . . And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That’s what it is to have a wife.

Friends of Lawrence must have smiled when they read these words, for he was hardly giving an accurate description of his own marriage. As I have mentioned, Lawrence and Frieda frequently fell into violent quarrels, and she would often demean and humiliate him, and he her. Yet, ultimately, Frieda believed in Lawrence’s abilities and his mission in life; he knew it and derived strength from it. Those who may think that Lawrence’s prescriptions for marriage require an extraordinarily submissive and even unintelligent wife should take note of the sort of woman Lawrence himself chose.

Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent:

You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.

Initially in these remarks Lawrence seems to be taking a position different from the one he expressed in the later Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he asserts that the man derives his chief fulfillment from purpose, not from the home and family. But Lawrence’s position is complex. He believes that the man requires a relationship to a woman in order to be strengthened in the pursuit of his purpose. Recall the lines I quoted earlier, “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.” Man fulfills himself through having a purpose beyond the home, but he must have a home and a wife to support him. Through romantic love (which always involves a strong sexual component) the man comes to his primal self, and emerges from the encounter with the strength to carry on in the world. Lawrence is telling his correspondent—and this becomes clear in the last lines of the passage quoted—that in order to accomplish anything meaningful he must first submerge himself, body and soul, into love for his wife.

Of course, this makes it sound as if Lawrence regards married love merely as a means to an end: merely as a means to pursuing a male “purpose.” Elsewhere, however, he speaks of it as if it were an end in itself. This is particularly the case in Women in Love. Early in the novel Birkin tells Gerald, “I find . . . that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. . . . The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.” Again, Lawrence is seeking a way to get beyond idealism, and all the corrupt apparatus of modern, ego-driven life. To get beyond this, to what? To the true self, and to relationships based upon blood-consciousness and honest, uncorrupted sentiment. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s plan for achieving this involves a “perfect union” with a woman (and, as he states in the same novel, “the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”).

Birkin wants to achieve this with Ursula, but he keeps insisting over and over (much to her bewilderment and anger) that he means something more than mere “love.” The reason for this is that Birkin and Lawrence associate “love” with an ideal that is drummed into the heads of people in the modern, post-Christian world. We are issued with the baffling injunction to “love thy neighbor,” where thy neighbor means all of humanity. Any intelligent person can see that to love everyone means to love no one in particular. And any psychologically healthy person would find valueless the “love” of someone who claimed also to love all the rest of humanity. Lawrence is reacting also against the lovey-dovey, white lace, sanitized, billing and cooing sort of “love” that society encourages in married couples. Lawrence’s disgust for this sort of thing is expressed in his short story “In Love.” The main character, Hester, is repulsed by the “love” her fiancé, Joe, shows for her. They had been friends prior to their engagement and got on well

But now, alas, since she had promised to marry him, he had made the wretched mistake of falling “in love” with her. He had never been that way before. And if she had known he would get this way now, she would have said decidedly: Let us remain friends, Joe, for this sort of thing is a come-down. Once he started cuddling and petting, she couldn’t stand him. Yet she felt she ought to. She imagined she even ought to like it. Though where the ought came from, she could not see.

Birkin (like Lawrence) wants to avoid at all costs falling into this sort of scripted, stereotyped love relationship, but Ursula has a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that he does want. He tries his best to explain it to her:

“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”

The “final me and you” refers to the primal self. “The old ideals are dead as nails” and so is modern civilization. Birkin does not want his relationship to Ursula to “fit” into the modern social scheme, to become conventional or “safe.” He also fears and abhors the impress of society on his conscious, mental self. He does not want to come together with Ursula “though the ego,” as it were. He wants them to come together through their primal selves and to forge a relationship that is based on something deeper and far stronger than what the overly socialized creatures around him call “love.” Yet, at the same time, one could simply say that what he wants is a truer, deeper love, and that what passes for love with other people is usually not the genuine article. They are doing what one “ought” to do, even when in bed together.

In The Rainbow (to which Women in Love forms the “sequel”), Tom Brangwen offers his views on love and marriage in a famous passage:

“There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it. . . . If we’ve got to be Angels . . . and if there is no such thing as a man or a woman among them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel. . . . [An] Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. . . . An Angel’s got to be more than a human being. . . . So I say, an Angel is the soul of a man and a woman in one: they rise united at the Judgment Day, as one angel. . . . If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married soul, and not my single soul.”

À la Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, men and women form two halves of a complete human being. Human nature divides itself into two, complementary aspects: masculinity and femininity. A complete human being is made when a man and a woman are joined together. But they cannot be joined—not really—through the mental, social self, but only through the unconscious, primal self.

In Women in Love, this view returns but in a modified form. Now Birkin tells us, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.” And Lawrence tells us of Birkin, “he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.” Tom Brangwen’s view implies that men and women, considered separately, do not have complete souls, and that a complete soul is made only when they join together in marriage. There is a suggestion in what he says that the “individuality” of single men and women is false, and that only a married couple constitutes a true individual. Birkin’s ideal, on the other hand, involves the man and the woman each preserving their selfhood and individuality and “balancing” each other.

Despite the fact that Birkin frequently, and transparently, speaks for Lawrence we cannot take him as speaking for Lawrence here. I believe that it is Brangwen’s position that is closest to Lawrence’s own. When Women in Love opens, Birkin is in a relationship with Hermione, who Lawrence portrays as a woman living entirely from out of her head, without any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet there is a bit of this in Birkin as well, which is perhaps why he reacts against it so violently when he sees it in Hermione. After the passage just quoted from Women in Love, Lawrence writes of Birkin, “He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. . . . And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.” Lawrence then goes on to describe Birkin’s fear and loathing of women’s “clutching.” Birkin is a conflicted character. He wants to lose himself in a relationship with a woman, but fears it at the same time. He wants Ursula, and talks on and on about spontaneity and the evil of ideals, yet he is continually preaching to Ursula about his ideal relationship which, conveniently, is one in which he can unite with her yet preserve his ego intact. This at first bewilders then infuriates Ursula, who never understands what it is that he wants. In the end, the problem resolves itself, probably just as it would in real life. Drawn to Ursula by a power stronger than his conscious ego, Birkin eventually drops all of his talk, surrenders his will, and settles into a married bliss that is marred only by his continued desire for the love of a man.

Ultimately, Lawrence believes that the “establishment of a new relation” between men and women depends upon a return to the oldest of relationships, and that this is possible only through a recovery of the oldest part of the self. We must, he believes, drop our ideal of the unisex society and be alive again to the fundamental, natural differences between men and women. Men and woman do not naturally desire to enjoy each other’s society at all times. We must not only educate men and women apart, but re-establish “spaces” within civilized society where men can be with men, and women with women. We must not force men and women together and command them to forget that they are men and women. Education and, indeed, much else in society must work to cultivate and to affirm the natural, masculine qualities and virtues in men, and the feminine qualities and virtues in women. Having become true men and women and having awakened, through their apartness, to the mystery and the allure that is the opposite sex, they will then come together and forge romantic alliances that are not based upon talk and “common values” but upon the “pull” between man and woman. Lawrence is not referring here simply to lust. A sexual element is, of course, involved, but what he means is the mysterious, ineffable attraction between an individual man and a woman, what we often call “chemistry,” which has nothing to do with the words they utter or the ideals they pay lip service to. And once this attraction is established, if the two desire to become bound to each other, then they must surrender themselves to the relationship. They must overcome their fear of the loss of ego boundaries. They must drop all talk of “rights” and not fall into the trap of treating the marriage as if it were a business partnership. For both, it is a leap into the unknown but in this case the unknown is the natural. When we plant a seed we must close the earth over it and go off and wait in anticipation. But we know that nature, being what it is, will produce as it has before. If all goes well, in that spot will grow the plant we were expecting. Similarly, marriage is not a human invention but something that grows naturally between a man and woman if its seed is planted in the fertile soil of the primal selves of each.

Nobelprijswinnaar niet welkom in Turkije

Ex: http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/

Nobelprijswinnaar niet welkom in Turkije

Van onze correspondent

ISTANBOEL -  De Britse schrijver V.S. Naipaul, die in 2001 de Nobelprijs
voor de Literatuur won, kan vanwege zijn kritiek op de islam niet deelnemen
aan een internationale literaire bijeenkomst in Istanboel.

Aanvankelijk was de in Trinidad geboren Naipaul als eregast uitgenodigd voorhet European Writers Parliament, een groot internationaal literair evenement dat vandaag in Istanboel van start gaat. Toen dat bekend werd, protesteerde een groep Turkse schrijvers fel en dreigde met een boycot.

De komst van Naipaul zou "een belediging zijn voor moslims", vanwege eerdere uitlatingen van de schrijver over de islam.

Zo heeft de Nobelprijswinnaar eens gezegd dat islamisering een vorm van
kolonisatie is die rampzalige gevolgen met zich meebrengt. Dat zou volgens
Naipaul vooral gelden voor mensen die zich tot de islam bekeren, omdat ze
hun afkomst en eigen verleden moeten verloochenen.

Volgens de Turkse dichter en filosoof Hilmi Yavuz beledigt de schrijver met
zulke opmerkingen de islam en moslims. Daarom is zijn komst naar het
literaire evenement niet gewenst, aldus Yavuz. Vele andere Turkse schrijvers
zijn dezelfde mening toegedaan. "De uitnodiging aan Naipaul moet worden
ingetrokken en men moet de schrijver vertellen wat daarvan de reden is",
aldus Özdenören. "De aanwezigheid van Naipaul is een belediging voor
moslims", aldus de linkse Turkse schrijver Cezmi Ersöz.

De organisator van het evenement, Ahmet Kot, probeerde nog de protesterende
Turkse schrijvers tegemoet te komen door Naipaul niet meer als eregast te
verwelkomen. Naipaul zou alleen de openingsspeech houden. Het
compromisvoorstel mocht niet baten. De protesterende Turkse schrijvers
hielden voet bij stuk. Daarna hebben het organisatiecomité en Naipaul
gezamenlijk besloten dat het beter is dat hij thuisblijft.

Croquis étrusques de D. H. Lawrence

Croquis étrusques de D. H. Lawrence

Ex: http://stalker.hautetfort.com/

À propos de D. H. Lawrence, Croquis étrusques (Le Bruit du Temps, préface de Gabriel Levin, traduction de l’anglais par Jean-Baptiste de Seynes, appareil critique établi par Simonetta de Filippis pour la Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, notice traduite par Élisabeth Vialle, 2010).

^{LRSP (livre reçu en service de presse).}

C’est à la fin du VII^e siècle avant la naissance du Christ qu’apparaît en Toscane une population que les Latins appelleront Tusci ou Etrusci, dont les origines continuent de rester énigmatiques. On suggère aujourd’hui que la culture étrusque est née d’un ancien substrat local qui s’est lentement modifié au cours des différentes vagues de population s’installant en Italie, tandis que l’hypothèse qui prévalait au début du siècle passé rejoignait le récit d’Hérodote, d’après lequel ce peuple serait venu par la mer de Lydie.
Après un essor spectaculaire, la civilisation étrusque est entrée, à partir du V^e siècle, dans une phase d’affaiblissement notable jusqu’à sa soumission à Rome aux IV^e et III^e siècles.
Pourtant, au milieu du VII^e siècle, ce peuple fascinant de Toscane à la vocation maritime, avait commencé à se poser en rival sérieux des Grecs pour l’hégémonie méditerranéenne. Ainsi, allié à Carthage, il avait accepté la pénétration punique en Sardaigne alors que, dès le milieu du VI^e siècle, il dut affronter les Hellènes désireux de coloniser l’Italie méridionale.
Cette période de guerres et d’alliances s’acheva en 474 par une défaite étrusque face à la coalition maritime que menèrent Cumes et Syracuse.
Cette date marque le début de l’effondrement du système confédéral instauré par Tarchon et regroupant, selon la tradition, douze cités ou groupes urbains dirigés par un lucumon, dans la région située entre l’Arno et le Tibre. C’est ce même Tarchon qui, selon la légende, fut le premier à fonder douze villes dans le nord de l’Italie, franchit ensuite les Apennins pour fonder la ville de Mantoue puis onze autres villes, redoublant ainsi la ligue originelle, villes qui s’unirent en une ligue appelée par les Latins Duodecim Populi Etruriae. Tarquinia était la plus ancienne des douze premières cités-États. Il y avait aussi Vulci, Vetulonia, Cerveteri, Arezzo, Chiusi, Roselle, Volterra, Cortona, Perugia, Volsinii, Populonia, certaines d’entre elles constituant les titres des chapitres du livre de Lawrence.
Après la défaite devant Cumes, les comptoirs commerciaux étrusques s’effondrèrent les uns après les autres sous la pression des Oscques et des Sabelliens qui prennent Capoue en 430.
Quoi qu’il en soit, durant les premiers siècles de l’histoire romaine, l’Étrurie sut conserver une relative indépendance, les Étrusques ayant obtenu le droit à la citoyenneté romaine en 89 avant Jésus-Christ, alors que l’Étrurie devient, elle, dans la division administrative de l’Italie conçue par Auguste, la septième région. Élie Faure évoque bellement l’appétit insatiable de conquêtes, secrètement conforté par l’Étrurie soumise devenue le cœur de l’Empire, qui fut celui de Rome : «Dès ses débuts, Rome est elle-même. Elle détourne à son profit les sources morales du vieux monde, comme elle détournait les eaux dans les montagnes pour les amener dans ses murs. Une fois la source captée, son avidité l’épuise, elle va plus loin pour en capter une autre.Dès le commencement du III^e siècle l’Étrurie, broyée par Rome, cimente de son sang, de ses nerfs, avec le sang et les nerfs des Latins, des Sabins, le bloc où Rome s’appuiera pour se répandre sur la terre, en cercles concentriques, dans un effort profond» (in Histoire de l’art. L’art antique, Gallimard, coll. Folio Essais, 1988, pp. 305-6). Lawrence, parfois, fort rarement à vrai dire, croit découvrir sur les visages de certains hommes et femmes croisés lors de son périple les traits caractéristiques qu’il prête aux anciens Étrusques. De même, il constatera que de très anciens édifices construits par ce peuple disparu ont été restaurés, plus ou moins fidèlement à son goût, par son implacable conquérant romain.
La langue étrusque fut tout d’abord parlée en Toscane. Nous en avons conservé plus de dix mille inscriptions ainsi qu’un texte manuscrit de mille cinq cents mots environs, inscrits sur les bandelettes de lin enveloppant une momie. Les autres textes connus à caractère votif ou funéraire n’expriment guère que le nom du fidèle ou du défunt. L’alphabet a été emprunté au grec, probablement autour de 700 avant Jésus-Christ, sous l’influence des colonies grecques des îles Pithécuses. Elle demeure indéchiffrable pour Lawrence et, bien sûr, d’autant plus poétique.
La religion des Étrusques, sur laquelle notre auteur écrira de belles et étranges pages, a fait l’objet de maints commentaires de la part des Anciens. Peut-être d’origine orientale, sa «révélation» avait été consignée dans des livres sacrés dépositaires de la théologie et des rites inspirés par le génie Tagès et la nymphe Végoia, aux antipodes du paganisme gréco-romain.
C’est chargé d’un immense savoir livresque qu’il ne manquera pas de moquer dans son propre livre, c’est après avoir accumulé les lectures des ouvrages savants de Mommsen, Weege, Ducati ou encore Fell (1), que D. H. Lawrence commence son périple au milieu des ruines des anciennes villes étrusques, qu’il a projeté de visiter dès la fin mars 1926. Lawrence connaît aussi bien qu’il l’aime l’Italie qui ne «juge pas» (2), à ses yeux, à la différence de pays fatigués comme l’Angleterre et l’Allemagne, où la morale a remplacé la belle vitalité des peuples jeunes. Pour ce qui concerne la civilisation étrusque, l’écrivain semble avoir été frappé, assez tôt (en 1908) par sa lecture de La Peau de chagrin de Balzac, roman publié en 1831, dans lequel, dès le début du livre, le héros observe un vase étrusque qui le fascine : «Ah ! Qui n’aurait souri comme lui de voir sur un fond rouge la jeune fille brune dansant dans la fine argile d’un vase étrusque devant le Dieu Priape qu’elle saluait d’un air joyeux». En 1915, c’est la lecture du chapitre IX (intitulé Le culte des arbres) du célèbre Rameau d’or de Frazer qui frappe l’esprit de Lawrence comme il a durablement frappé celui de tant d’autres écrivains (comme T. S. Eliot), chapitre où sont mentionnés l’Étrurie centrale et ses «champs fertiles».
Ce savoir que D. H. Lawrence accumula pourtant consciencieusement durant les années de lente maturation de son projet de livre ne lui fut que d’un maigre secours au moment de rédiger ce dernier et même, au moment où il fut lu et critiqué par ses premiers lecteurs professionnels (cf. pp. 272-278 de notre ouvrage). Plusieurs critiques reprochèrent en effet à l’écrivain son manque de sérieux scientifique, alors que Lawrence, de son côté, avait plusieurs fois émis des doutes, dans les lettres adressées à ses amis et éditeurs, sur la capacité réelle des foules à apprécier et goûter son œuvre qui, pour réellement exister, devait à son goût se détacher du savoir pulvérulent et sans grâce des gros livres savants et inutiles mais, tout autant, se frayer un chemin difficile vers le cœur de lecteurs ne sachant plus vraiment lire.
Quoi qu’il en soit, ce dépouillement nécessaire était finalement dans la logique même des différents croquis que Lawrence consacra aux tombes étrusques ornées de fresques magnifiques. Car c’est tout compte fait peu dire que, au travers de la découverte puis de la description de ces chefs-d’œuvre picturaux des anciens âges, l’unique sujet de l’écrivain est l’opposition entre le fourmillement plein de vie du passé et l’étiolement bavard dans lequel nos sociétés modernes sont tombées. Pénétrant dans les ténèbres des caveaux étrusques, Lawrence est un homme qui semble se dépouiller de sa très vieille peau occidentale comme un serpent qui ferait sa mue, et se remplir, a contrario, d’un savoir paradoxal qui irrigue son être tout entier, comme la religion des Anciens, selon l’écrivain, a irrigué les danseurs dont il contemple les représentations sur les murs des tombeaux : «Comme le disait l’antique auteur païen, écrit ainsi Lawrence : Il n’est partie vivante de nous ou de nos corps qui ne ressente la religion; dès lors, qu’aucune chanson ne manque à l’âme, et qu’aux genoux et au cœur abondent le bond et la danse; car tous autant qu’ils sont connaissent les dieux…» (p. 109). Nous ne les connaissons plus, puisqu’il est vrai que nous ne dansons ou même ne savons plus danser, comme Lawrence d’ailleurs le remarque, en accomplissant des gestes scellant la magique entente des hommes et du monde qui les porte.
L’Italie elle-même, du moins dans sa partie qui conserve quelques antiques traces du peuple disparu, paraît pour Lawrence (mais qu’en est-il de nos jours ?) s’être salutairement éloignée du foyer de contagion : la vie moderne qui corrompt le vivant de façon irrémédiable. Ainsi, dès le tout premier texte des Croquis étrusques, Cerveteri, décrivant le visage d’un des habitants de la peu riante région qu’il traverse avec son ami, nous pouvons lire sous la plume de Lawrence : «Il est probable que, quand je retournerai dans le Sud, il aura disparu. Ils ne peuvent survivre, ces hommes à visage de faune au profil si pur, avec ce calme étrange qui est le leur, éloigné de toute morale. Seuls survivent les visages déflorés» (p. 24).
C’est dire en somme que la civilisation étrusque, insouciante, légère, aérienne comme les oiseaux qui ornent les fresques de ses tombeaux, était condamnée à disparaître dans un monde qui, au fil des siècles, s’est figé dans la lourdeur sans vie des peuples sérieux qui ont oublié la danse, le rire et les chants célébrant l’harmonie rejouée par chaque nouvelle célébration. Finalement encore, notre époque consacre le triomphe des visages flétris, comme, sous couvert de respect d’une morale aussi ridicule que contraignante (sans compter qu’elle est mensongère), notre société magnifie le comble de la dégénérescence, les portraits de milliers de Dorian Gray qui, devenus trop compliqués, exclusivement cérébraux, ont perdu tout contact réel avec la «verte primitivité» chère à Kierkegaard qui est à l’œuvre, selon D. H. Lawrence, dans l’ensemble des témoignages que la civilisation étrusque nous a légués. Vitalité des premiers jours de l’homme. Immobilité, en dépit même du mythe du progrès qui lance ses milliers de tentacules dans toutes les directions, de l’homme moderne. Art de l’aube des peuples, «émerveillement des matinées humaines» comme dit le poète, science véritable de la vie quotidienne contre psychologie des «ignorantins» que nous sommes devenus (cf. p. 127).
L’écrivain poursuit, contemplant cette fois les visages féminins, porteurs d’un secret évident, qui se tient à portée de regard ou plutôt, pour l’auteur de L’Amant de lady Chatterley, à portée de toucher (au sens de communication physique et pré-mentale que Mellors, dans le roman le plus célèbre de Lawrence, développera) : «Ce sont de belles femmes, issues d’un monde ancien, en qui se mêlent ce silence et cette réserve qui les rendent si attirantes et qui sans doute étaient leur apanage, dans le passé. Comme si, au profond de chaque femme, il y avait encore quelque chose à chercher que l’œil jamais n’est en mesure de déceler. Quelque chose qui peut être perdu, et qui jamais ne peut être retrouvé» (p. 26). C’est dire que la femme est toujours du côté du passé, précieux puits originel d’où sortent les hommes hagards, presque immédiatement nostalgiques de ce qu’ils ont conscience d’avoir perdu d’une façon irrémédiable et qu’ils tenteront, leur vie durant, de reconquérir de mille et mille façons, par la guerre, l’art, l’écriture, la déchéance même, surtout si elle devient un dérèglement systématique de tous les sens. Et ce qu’ils ont perdu, ce que chaque homme perd en venant au monde, ce sont la beauté, la sécurité, une forme souveraine d’harmonie inconsciente, primitive, primesautière, pas moins reliée à toute la chaîne des vivants et à l’univers tout entier, le secret éternellement rejoué à chaque nouvelle naissance de l’être et de ses manifestations, que D. H. Lawrence ira chercher au plus profond de l’obscurité gardienne d’un peu de poussière qui autrefois fut femme et homme.
Ce secret de la spontanéité et de la fraîcheur de la vie, Lawrence les surprend ainsi dans les fresques splendides qui ornent les dernières demeures de riches Étrusques : «Aux formes et mouvements des murs et volumes souterrains s’attache une simplicité jointe à une spontanéité, un naturel dépoitraillé tout à fait particulier qui, immédiatement, réconforte l’esprit. Les Grecs cherchaient à faire impression, et le gothique bien plus encore vise à frapper l’esprit. Les Étrusques, non. Ce qu’ils réalisaient, en ces siècles insouciants où ils vécurent, apparaît aussi simple et naturel que la respiration. Ils laissent la poitrine respirer librement, aspirer sans effort une certaine abondance de vie» (p. 38).
Belle, audacieuse image bien que je ne pense pas que nous puissions véritablement parler de «siècles insouciants» à propos des âges de rapines et de violences de toute sorte qui furent ceux des anciens peuples ayant colonisé l’Italie. Élie Faure a raison de distendre l’ombre inquiétante qui est celle des personnages si joyeux de vivre que Lawrence croit contempler de son regard grisé, creusant la naïveté des dessins étrusques d’une profondeur qui, à vrai dire, n’est absolument pas étrangère au texte de Lawrence lui-même, surtout lorsqu’il contemple, pris de vertige, l’abîme des siècles et des millénaires : «Le prêtre règne. Les formes sont enfermées dans les tombeaux. La sculpture des sarcophages où deux figures étranges, le bas du corps cassé, le haut secret et souriant s’accoudent avec la raideur et l’expression mécaniques que tous les archaïsmes ont connues, les fresques des chambres funéraires qui racontent des sacrifices et des égorgements, tout leur art est fanatique, superstitieux et tourmenté» (op. cit., p. 305). Je crois que Lawrence tente en fait de magnifier en estompant plus qu’en effaçant toutes ses ombres une époque de non-réflexivité absolue pour ainsi dire, où les femmes et les hommes préféraient de très loin vivre plutôt que se voir vivre, agir plutôt que bavarder comme il en va, selon l’écrivain, à notre époque anémiée.
Nous retrouvons ici la thématique si chère à Lawrence de la «conscience phallique» que nous pourrions caractériser comme l’aspiration naïve de la vie vers son expansion maximale et, surtout, libérée de toute contrainte d’ordre moral ou religieux (3) : «C’est la beauté de proportion naturelle de la conscience phallique, qui vient s’opposer aux proportions plus recherchées ou plus extatiques de la conscience mentale et spirituelle à laquelle nous sommes habitués» (p. 35). C’est dans L’Amant de lady Chatterley que Lawrence évoquera, tout comme il a fait du toucher un de ses thèmes centraux, cette «conscience phallique», écrivant de son livre qu’il est un : «roman phallique, tendre et délicat – pas un roman érotique au sens propre […]. Je crois sincèrement qu’il faut restaurer, ajoute-t-il, une conscience phallique dans nos vies, parce qu’elle est à la source de toute vraie beauté et de toute vraie douceur» (4).
La simplicité que Lawrence voit à l’œuvre dans l’art funéraire étrusque est encore décrit comme un «naturel confinant à la platitude» et, plus loin, comme un véritable secret dont la clé a été perdue : «C’est là presque toujours présent dans les objets étrusques, ce naturel confinant à la platitude, mais qui en général l’évite, et qui, bien souvent, atteint à une originalité si spontanée, si hardie et si fraîche que nous, amoureux des conventions et des expressions «ramenées à une norme», en venons à qualifier cet art de bâtard et de banal» (p. 79).
Lawrence, suivant en cela la leçon d’un nombre incalculable d’auteurs mais sans toutefois tomber dans le délire de certains qui, comme Keyserling, fonda à Darmstadt en 1920 une École de la Sagesse dénonçant les limites de la culture occidentale et puisant son enseignement de pacotille dans une Inde fantasmée, confère au monde ancien une vertu éminente : au contraire de ce que nous pouvons constater à notre époque de spécialistes qui poussent de grands cris dès qu’un esprit un peu audacieux essaie de créer des passerelles entre plusieurs domaines de savoir, le monde ancien ne craignait pas d’établir des parentés symboliques, donc réelles, entre les êtres vivants et les choses, reliés par un flux souterrain de sang (5). «Merveilleux monde, écrit ainsi Lawrence, qu’était sans doute ce monde ancien où toutes choses semblaient vivantes, luisantes dans l’ombre crépusculaire du contact qui les faisait se toucher, un monde où chaque chose n’était pas seulement une individualité isolée prise au piège de la lumière diurne; où chaque chose apparaissait en son clair contour, visuellement, mais qui du sein de sa clarté même était reliée par des affinités émotionnelles ou vitales à d’autres choses étranges, une chose surgissant d’une autre, mentalement contradictoires qui fusionnaient dans l’émotion, si bien qu’un lion pouvait au même instant être aussi une chèvre, et ne pas être une chèvre [Lawrence a évoqué précédemment la chimère en bronze d’Arezzo, conservée au musée de Florence et qui fut en partie restaurée par Benvenuto Cellini)» (p. 142).
Plus même, puisque Lawrence, tirant finalement les conséquences logiques du mythe de l’Âge d’or, ayant même peut-être lu Vico qui associait naissance du langage et chant dans une même étreinte poétique de l’univers, affirme que les anciens dont il contemple les œuvres d’art étaient de véritables enfants : «Les anciens voyaient consciemment ce que les enfants voient inconsciemment : l’éternelle merveille des choses. Dans le monde antique, les trois émotions cardinales devaient être l’émerveillement, la crainte et l’admiration – l’admiration au sens latin du mot comme dans notre acception présente, et la crainte dans sa signification la plus large, qui inclut la répulsion, l’épouvante et la haine» (p. 143). Puisque les Étrusques incarnaient merveilleusement les vertus de l’aube (l’insouciance, la légèreté, la spontanéité, la fraîcheur, la joie), ils ne pouvaient être que de véritables enfants, et non point de ridicules adultes qui singeraient l’enfance. Leur caractère enfantin plutôt qu’infantile provenait du fait qu’ils ne séparaient point les êtres qu’ils considéraient de la grande chaîne reliant toutes les choses, tous les êtres créés. L’esprit d’abstraction, au sens propre du terme, leur était inconnu. Ils ne connaissaient que l’esprit procédant par association symbolique, qui est sans doute le seul qui soit capable de révéler la vérité profonde des êtres. Lawrence emploie, à propos de cette vérité profonde, une magnifique expression (que je souligne), écrivant : «C’est en étant capable de voir le qui-vive de toutes choses au cœur partout ramifié de la grande signification, toute palpitante de passion, que les anciens maintenaient vivants l’émerveillement et la délectation, mais aussi bien l’effroi et la répugnance. Ils étaient comme les enfants – mais ils avaient la force, la puissance et la connaissance sensuelle des vrais adultes» (pp. 143-4).
Et l’auteur de tirer toutes les conséquences de cette idée selon laquelle l’homme a perdu la grâce de ses premiers gestes. La religion elle-même, selon Lawrence, a vu sa nature profonde s’infléchir pour n’être plus qu’un vil instrument dont l’homme se sert. Tout le délire mécaniciste moderne semble pour Lawrence sorti du culte grec de la raison et du génie bâtisseur romain : «L’ancienne religion, qui voulait que l’homme assidûment tente de s’harmoniser avec la nature, tienne ferme sur ses pieds et s’épanouisse en fleur dans le grand bouillonnement de la vie, s’est transformée avec les Grecs et les Romains en un désir de résister à la nature, de développer la ruse mentale et la force mécanique susceptibles de surpasser la nature en intelligence et de l’enchaîner complètement, complètement au point qu’il ne subsiste plus aucune liberté en cette nature et que tout soit contrôlé, domestiqué et asservi aux pouvoirs mesquins de l’homme» (p. 158).
C’est dans un chapitre inachevé, resté à l’état de manuscrit et qui, peut-être, eût pu servir à Lawrence de conclusion pour ses Croquis étrusques, intitulé Le musée de Florence, que l’auteur va systématiser ses intuitions sur le thème d’une déperdition, au travers des siècles, d’une force rayonnante qui s’échappe désormais inéluctablement des œuvres des hommes. Ainsi, selon Lawrence, nous devons bien comprendre que les religions elles-mêmes de nos ancêtres les plus magnifiques, comme le sont, à ses yeux, les Étrusques, ne sont que des bribes d’un savoir immémorial ayant précédé les plus anciennes civilisations : «Ce qu’il nous faut saisir lorsque nous contemplons des œuvres étrusques, c’est que celles-ci nous révèlent les derniers feux d’une conscience cosmique humaine – disons, la tentative d’hommes aspirant à la conscience cosmique – différente de la nôtre. L’idée qui veut que notre histoire soit issue des cavernes ou de précaires habitats lacustres est puérile. Notre histoire prend corps à l’achèvement d’une phase précédente de l’histoire humaine, une phase prodigieuse et comparable à la nôtre. Il est bien plus vraisemblable que le singe descende de nous que nous du singe» (p. 225). Renversement de perspective qui a dû faire bondir les esprits scientistes ou chagrins, c’est tout un, qui lurent les Croquis étrusques lorsqu’ils furent publiés ! On se demande même comment l’auteur n’a semble-t-il pas été traité de réactionnaire. Il l’a peut-être été, à la réflexion, tout comme on n’a pas manqué de lui reprocher son manque de sérieux scientifique (cf. la réception du livre, pp. 272-278). Citons donc longuement ce très beau passage, toujours extrait du même texte qui ne fut pas recueilli en livre par Lawrence, où il semble sérieusement douter de la théorie de l’évolution, l’homme ayant toujours été un homme, l’homme ne provenant pas du singe comme nous l’avons vu mais l’homme, pourtant, depuis qu’il s’est coupé de ses plus profondes racines de savoir symbolique, paraissant en revanche devoir dégénérer, dévoluer : «Les civilisations apparaissent comme des vagues, et comme des vagues elles s’évanouissent. Tant que la science, ou l’art, n’aura pu saisir le sens dernier de ces symboles flottant sur l’ultime vague de la période préhistorique, c’est-à-dire cette période qui précède la nôtre, nous ne serons pas en mesure d’instituer la juste relation avec l’homme en ce qu’il est, en ce qu’il fut, en ce que toujours il sera.
Aux temps d’avant Homère, les hommes vivant en Europe n’étaient pas de simples brutes, des sauvages ou des monstres prognathes; ce n’étaient pas non plus de grands enfants stupides. Les hommes restent des hommes, et bien que l’intelligence puisse prendre diverses formes, les hommes sont toujours intelligents : ce ne sont pas des imbéciles mal dégrossis, des crétins en masse.
Ces symboles qui nous parviennent à la crête des dernières vagues de la culture préhistorique constituent le reliquat d’une immense et très ancienne tentative de l’humanité de se former une conception de l’univers. Cette conception s’est exténuée, elle a volé en éclats au moment même où elle reprenait vie, en Égypte. Elle a connu un nouvel essor dans la Chine ancienne, en Inde, en Babylonie et en Asie Mineure, chez les Druides, chez les Teutons, chez les Aztèques et les Mayas de l’Amérique, chez les Noirs même. Mais à chaque fois cet essor était plus faible, la vague se mourait, le flux de conscience peu à peu se transformait en un autre flux traversé de multiples courants contradictoires» (p. 226, l’auteur souligne).
Je parlais plus haut de secret. Lawrence écrit, opposant une nouvelle fois le passé magnifié d’un débordement d’énergie et de candeur et le présent se mourant par son excès de normes et de réflexion : «C’est comme si un courant puissant venu de quelque vie différente les traversait de part en part, sans rien de commun avec le courant superficiel qui nous anime aujourd’hui; comme si les Étrusques tiraient leur vitalité de profondeurs inconnues dont l’accès nous est désormais refusé» (p. 111).
Citons d’ailleurs, extrait des Tombes peintes de Tarquinia, I, ce long passage, très intéressant, où se découvre le mépris de Lawrence à l’égard d’un peuple, celui composé par ses contemporains, considéré comme étant un immense lecteur aveugle, incapable de goûter la beauté secrète d’une œuvre. Ce thème est très présent dans la correspondance de l’écrivain, y compris même durant les mois qui précèdent la rédaction de ses Croquis étrusques dont Lawrence doute fortement qu’ils soient appréciés d’un public de plus en plus grossier et inculte. L’ésotérisme, par essence, ne peut être réservé qu’à une élite puisque, de fait, il ne peut être séparé non point seulement d’une révélation mais d’une pratique, dont ne peut absolument rien dire celui qui ne l’a point vécue. Dans ce même passage, l’auteur affirme que notre époque n’est plus même reliée à son prestigieux passé par un filet de savoir secret (6), alors que, inversement, c’est la maigreur même de ce savoir transmis depuis les âges les plus anciens qui entretient son insurpassable bavardage : «Les peuples ne sont pas initiés aux cosmogonies, ni ne se voient révéler le chemin vers cet état d’éveil où palpite la conscience aiguisée. Quoi que vous puissiez faire, jamais la masse des hommes n’atteindra cette vibration de la pleine conscience. Il ne leur est pas possible d’aller au-delà d’un soupçon de conscience.en foi de quoi il faut leur donner des symboles, des rituels et des signes qui empliront leur corps de vie jusqu’à la mesure qu’ils peuvent contenir. Plus leur serait fatal. C’est la raison pour laquelle il convient de les tenir à l’écart du vrai savoir, de crainte que, connaissant les formules sans avoir jamais traversé les expériences qui y correspondent, ils deviennent insolents et impies, croyant avoir atteint le grand tout quand ils ne maîtrisent en réalité qu’un verbiage creux. La connaissance ésotérique sera toujours ésotérique, car la connaissance est une expérience, non une formule. Par ailleurs, il est stupide de galvauder les formules. Même un petit savoir est chose dangereuse. Aucune époque ne l’a mieux montré que la nôtre. Le verbiage est, en définitive, ce qu’il y a de plus désastreux» (pp. 114-5, l’auteur souligne).
D’une autre façon, Lawrence raillera la science muséographique, invoquant le prétexte que la plongée réelle dans le passé ne peut être qu’une expérience poétique : «Mais quel intérêt présentent ces leçons de choses concernant des races évanouies ? Ce que l’on cherche, c’est un contact. Les Étrusques ne sont ni une théorie ni une thèse. Ils sont, d’abord et avant tout, une expérience» (p. 218, l’auteur souligne). Et l’écrivain d’enfoncer le clou : «Et c’est une expérience toujours ratée. Des musées, encore des musées, toujours des musées, des leçons de choses bricolées n’importe comment en vue d’illustrer les théories insanes des archéologues, tentatives insensées de coordonner et ajuster en un ordre intangible cela qui échappe à tout agencement définitif et se refuse à toute coordination !» (Ibid.) (7).
Le savoir est et ne peut être qu’expérience véritable, non point accumulation de thèses mortes avant même que d’avoir été publiées, pour la raison qu’elles ne peuvent en aucun cas délivrer un savoir autre que livresque, les livres évoquant d’autres livres dans une régression infinie qui est synonyme de mort spirituelle et morale des hommes. Celui qui sait se tait (8), vérité de la plus immémoriale ancienneté que D. H. Lawrence aura redécouverte (9) en s’enfonçant dans les tombes abandonnées, pillées, parfois très endommagées, des Étrusques dont la force véritable, spirituelle, est aussi fragile que celle d’une plante mais n’en a pas moins prodigué son suc dans les membres de l’immense corps de l’empire romain, selon la loi que commente Élie Faure : «Asservi matériellement, un peuple de culture supérieure asservit moralement le peuple qui l’a vaincu» (op. cit., p. 309).
Et ce sont pourtant cette plante (une pâquerette, précise Lawrence) ou ce rossignol (10), manifestations les plus humbles de la vie qui, plus durables qu’une altière pyramide qui finira par se désagréger au fil des millénaires, témoigneront d’une force dont les fresques étrusques gardent et révèlent le magnifique et bouleversant secret.

Notes
(1) Lawrence, avant de se rendre sur le terrain, a beaucoup lu sur la question, éminemment débattue à son époque, de la civilisation étrusque. Par exemple Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, que Lawrence connaissait dans sa traduction anglaise réalisée en 1861 (revue et corrigée en 1894), par W. P. Dickson, sous le titre The History of Rome. Fritz Weege, Etruskische Malerei (Halle, 1920-1921). Pericle Ducati, Etruria Antica (Turin, 1925). Roland Arthur Lonsdale Fell enfin, Etruria and Rome, Cambridge, 1924.
(2) The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (édition établie par James T. Boulton, Cambridge, 1979), I, p. 544, citées par Simonetta de Filippis dans la Notice aux Croquis étrusques, p. 250 de notre ouvrage.
(3) Voir cette curieuse image : «Si nous n’aimons pas les asphodèles, c’est à mon sens parce que nous rejetons tout ce qui est fier et jaillissant» (p. 28).
(4) In Letters of D. H. Lawrence, op. cit., tome VI, p. 328.
(5) «Le monde vivant, nous ne le connaîtrons jamais que symboliquement. Pourtant, chaque conscience – la rage du lion et le venin du serpent – est, donc elle est divine. Tout provient du cercle ininterrompu et de son noyau, le germe, l’Un, le Dieu, s’il vous plaît de l’appeler ainsi. Et l’homme qui apparaît, avec son âme et sa personnalité, est éternellement relié à l’ensemble. Le fleuve de sang est un, il est ininterrompu, mais il bouillonne d’oppositions et de contradictions» (p. 143).
(6) «C’est comme si un courant puissant venu de quelque vie différente les traversait de part en part, sans rien de commun avec le courant superficiel qui nous anime aujourd’hui; comme si les Étrusques tiraient leur vitalité de profondeurs inconnues dont l’accès nous est désormais refusé» (p. 111).
(7) C’est le sens des moqueries que D. H. Lawrence adresse à l’un des personnages qu’il a rencontrés lors de son voyage : «Mais le jeune Allemand ne veut rien entendre à tout cela. C’est un moderne, pour qui n’existent véritablement que les seules évidences. Un lion à tête de chèvre, en plus de sa propre tête, est une chose impensable. Et ce qui est impensable n’existe pas, n’est rien. Raison pour laquelle tous les symboles étrusques n’ont pour lui aucune réalité et ne témoignent que d’une grossière incapacité à penser. Il ne gaspillera pas une minute de son temps à y réfléchir. Ces symboles ne sont que le produit de l’impuissance mentale, par conséquent négligeables» (p. 139).
(8) «L’air du dehors nous paraît immense, blême, et de quelque façon vide. Nous ne percevons plus aucun des deux mondes, ni celui, souterrain, des Étrusques, ni celui du jour banal qui est le nôtre. Silencieux, épuisés, nous revenons vers la ville environnés de vent, le vieux chien stoïquement sur nos talons – et le guide nous promet de nous montrer les autres tombes dès le lendemain» (p. 110).
(9) La quête d’une vérité originelle semble avoir fasciné Lawrence qui écrit ainsi que les dieux personnels des Grecs «ne sont que les avatars décadents d’une religion cosmique antérieure», les «mythes grecs» n’étant pour leur part que «les représentations grossières de certaines conceptions ésotériques très anciennes et fort précises, qui sont bien plus âgées que les mythes – ou les Grecs» (p. 138).
(10) Voir cette image aussi étonnante que belle : «La force brute écrase de nombreuses plantes. Et pourtant ces plantes repoussent. Les pyramides ne durent qu’un instant, comparées à la pâquerette. Avant que Bouddha ou Jésus aient commencé de parler le rossignol chantait, et bien après que les paroles de Jésus ou de Bouddha seront tombées dans l’oubli, le rossignol continuera de chanter. Point de prêche ni d’enseignement, ni de commandement ou d’intimidation : juste le chant. Au commencement n’était pas le Verbe, mais le pépiement» (p. 71). Remarquons encore que Lawrence oppose l’antique religion des Étrusques qui «s’intéresse à l’ensemble des puissances et des forces physiques et créatrices en tant qu’elles participent à la construction et à la destruction de l’âme» à la religion du Verbe qui, étrange vue, n’accorderait aucune réalité au monde physique, Verbe qui «est martelé dru jusqu’à le rendre mince et permettre, comme une dorure, de recouvrir et dissimuler toutes choses» (p. 139).

Réflexions sur "Le Zéro et l'Infini" d'Arthur Koestler

Michael WIESBERG :

Réflexions sur Le Zéro et l’Infini d’Arthur Koestler

 

La vie d’Arthur Koestler fut loin d’être paisible et monotone. Après avoir abandonné ses études d’ingénieur à la « Haute Ecole Technique » de Vienne, il a émigré vers la Palestine où il a vécu de petits boulots occasionnels. Après ses mésaventures palestiniennes, les éditions Ullstein de Berlin lui offrent un poste de correspondant au Proche Orient, à Paris, puis un poste de journaliste scientifique à Berlin même. Cela durera de 1926 à 1931. Cette période est caractérisée par l’engagement passionné de Koestler pour la cause sioniste. En 1931, il change d’option : il s’engage dans le parti communiste allemand. Pendant la guerre civile espagnole, il écope d’une condamnation à mort et échappe de peu à l’exécution. Pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, il sert brièvement dans les armées française et britannique. Il finit par s’établir à Londres, où il écrira des ouvrages de vulgarisation scientifique. Le 3 mars 1983, il se suicide.

 

Le roman Le Zéro et l’Infini de Koestler paraît d’abord à Londres en 1940. La figure centrale et fictive de ce roman est un bolchevique de la vieille garde, ancien commissaire du peuple : Roubachov. Il est accusé de « menées contre-révolutionnaires », après que les services secrets soviétiques, les sbires du NKVD, l’aient arrêté et placé en détention. D’après Koestler lui-même, cette figure de fiction est inspirée par les dirigeants bolcheviques réels, et de premier plan, que furent Karl Radek, Nicolas Boukharine et Léon Trotski, qui, tous, en ultime instance, devinrent des victimes des purges staliniennes de la seconde moitié des années 30. En créant le personnage de Roubachov, Koestler a essayé de montrer, de manière exemplative, ce qui se passait dans les prisons du NKVD et d’expliquer comment ce noyau dur des anciens révolutionnaires d’octobre 1917 a pu être liquidé. Roubachov est confronté à deux autres personnages, ses adversaires tout au long de l’intrigue : Ivanov et Gletkine. Ils représentent deux générations de bolcheviques. Ivanov, le plus âgé, reçoit l’ordre de convaincre Roubachov de la nécessité de faire des aveux. Bien sûr, Ivanov sait que les crimes imputés à Roubachov sont purement fictifs. Et, malgré cela, il tente de convaincre celui-ci qu’il serait insensé de jouer les martyrs. On ne doit pas transformer le monde en un « bordel sentimental et métaphysique ». La pitié, la conscience, le remord et le doute doivent demeurer des « dérapages répréhensibles ». On ne doit pas abjurer la violence tant qu’il y a du chaos dans le monde. Tout compromis avec sa propre conscience, explique Ivanov au prisonnier, équivaut à de la désertion. Comme l’histoire est a priori immorale, toute attitude qui reposerait sur des décisions morales dictées par la conscience d’un individu, équivaudrait à faire de la politique en s’inspirant des bonnes paroles d’un prêche dominical. Pour cette raison, explique Ivanov, les blessures que ressent Roubachov dans sa propre conscience, au vu des hommes sacrifiés au nom de la « raison de parti », ne sont jamais que des « fictions grammaticales ».

 

Pour Koestler, cette notion de « fiction grammaticale » doit nous expliquer cette part du moi que l’on ne définit pas comme « logique » mais comme « personnelle ». Or comme ce moi est inexistant pour le parti, mais que la grammaire réclame un substantif pour cette chose, Ivanov nomme cet aspect du « moi » celui de la « fiction grammaticale ». Roubachov, dans cette phase-là de sa détention, est tourmenté par des scrupules moraux, à cause de ses propres manières d’agir d’antan : celles-ci étaient déterminées exclusivement par un schéma de pensée rationnelle et acceptaient en toute conscience les pertes humaines qu’imposait cette rationalité. Ivanov réussit finalement à convaincre Roubachov que les idées, que celui-ci cultive et rumine, relèvent d’une « sentimentalité bourgeoise ». « On n’entendra aucun coq chanter », dit Ivanov, « si, objectivement parlant, des individus nuisibles sont liquidés ».

 

Ivanov conjure alors Roubachov de tirer les « conséquences logiques » de leurs conversations, et obtient du prisonnier que celui-ci se déclare prêt à signer un aveu qui va dans le sens de l’accusation. A partir de ce moment-là du récit, le roman prend une tournure dramatique. Ivanov, qui, lui aussi, est une figure controversée, est accusé d’avoir mené l’enquête sur Roubachov de manière trop négligente : il est alors remplacé par un représentant de la jeune génération de bolcheviques, qui ne connaît pas les compromis. Ivanov est ensuite liquidé.

 

Gletkine, qui prend la place d’Ivanov, représente, dans Le Zéro et l’Infini, une génération qui agit toujours sans réticence aucune selon la ligne fixée par le parti et qui ne connaît plus personnellement les circonstances vécues par les premiers bolcheviques dans la Russie des Tsars. La liste des crimes supposés que Gletkine présente à Roubachov, est en fait un ramassis d’accusations fantaisistes, dont, en tête, celle d’avoir fomenté un attentat contre le « numéro un », Staline. La volonté de résister, chez Roubachov, est ensuite annihilée par l’application d’une procédure d’audition véritablement éreintante. Au cours de cette longue audition, on apprend pour quels motifs Roubachov doit être sacrifié. « L’expérience nous apprend », explique Gletkine, « que l’on doit donner aux masses des explications simples et compréhensibles pour les processus difficiles et compliqués ». Si l’on disait aux paysans que malgré « les acquis de la révolution », ils sont restés fainéants et arriérés, on n’obtiendra rien. Mais si on leur explique qu’ils sont des « héros du travail » et que l’on attribue les maux qui les frappent encore à des saboteurs, alors on obtiendra quelque chose. Gletkine explique alors de manière fort plausible que le parti est régi par le principe que « la fin justifie les moyens ». Le parti attend donc des « vieux bolcheviques » qu’ils se sacrifient. La raison de cette exigence réside dans le fait que la guerre menace l’Union Soviétique. En cas de guerre, s’il y a des mouvements d’opposition, cela peut conduire à la catastrophe. Gletkine déclare alors à Roubachov  qu’on lui reproche d’avoir, en liaison avec d’autres opposants, tenté de provoquer une scission au sein du parti. Si son repentir est « vrai », alors Roubachov doit aider le parti à éliminer cette scission. Il s’agit de montrer aux masses que tout opposant est un « criminel ». Après la victoire finale du socialisme, explique Gletkine, la vérité reviendra sans doute à la surface. A ce moment-là, Roubachov et les autres recevront la gratitude qui leur revient. Complètement brisé, Roubachov accepte pour finir de signer des aveux de culpabilité. Deux balles dans la nuque mettent fin à son existence.

 

Si l’on cherche à évaluer les conséquences des « grandes purges » pour l’Union Soviétique, l’attention se focalise immanquablement sur les successeurs des « vieux bolcheviques ». La nouvelle génération fut celle qui se soumit de manière inconditionnelle au parti. A la fin de la « tchistka » (de la « purge »), se dresse la pâle figure de l’apparatchik, caractérisée par une « non-identité ». Staline a créé les conditions préalables d’un système de parasites et de pleutres qui n’ânonnaient rien d’autre que les slogans doctrinaires du parti. Sous Staline, le matérialisme cru du marxisme-léninisme est entré dans un processus de perversion, dont l’apogée la plus emblématique fut l’émergence d’une pensée purement immanentiste, érigée au rang de dogme. C’est ainsi, in fine, que Staline a introduit les conditions initiales de l’effondrement final des systèmes sociaux du « socialisme réel » ou, plutôt, de l’égalitarisme radical.  L’idée d’un ordre socialiste juste est resté une chimère en Europe orientale, pour laquelle des millions d’hommes ont dû sacrifier leur vie.

 

L’histoire ne se répète pas. Une tyrannie à la Hitler ou à la Staline ne se présentera plus. Mais il est certainement une chose que le livre de Koestler nous enseigne, et qui reste valable aujourd’hui : il nous montre où nous mène un monde régi par la pleutrerie et la pensée conformiste. Une république qui se vante d’incarner la liberté et la démocratie n’est pas pour autant immunisée contre les tumeurs totalitaires. Il faut donc toujours, dans tous les cas de figure, apprendre à se défendre contre la pleutrerie et le conformisme dès qu’ils se pointent à l’horizon.

 

Michael WIESBERG.

(article paru dans « Junge Freiheit », Berlin, n°11/1996, dans la série « Mein Lieblingsbuch / Folge 6 : « Sonnenfinsternis » von Arthur Koestler – Chronik der stalinistischen Säuberung » / « Mon livre favori / 6°partie : « Le Zéro et l’Infini » d’Arthur Koestler – Chronique des purges staliniennes » - Trad.  franç. : octobre 2010).    

William Butler Yeats: A Poet for the West

Vic OLVIR

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

In saner times our great poets, writers, and philosophers expressed the feelings and ideas which came naturally from the race-soul. In these times those feelings and ideas are too “controversial” to be expressed freely, so where they cannot be suppressed outright, they are reinterpreted, obscured, and selectively anthologized by the alien arbiters of our culture. For no poet of our race has this been more true than for William Butler Yeats.

William Butler Yeats was probably the greatest poet of the modern age; T. S. Eliot acknowledged as much. His roots were deep in Ireland, but, withal, he embodied the questing spirit of the whole of Western culture.

It is impossible without writing a volume (or two) to render even a partial appreciation of his many-faceted life and work. He was born into the Irish Protestant tradition, of that line which included Swift, Burke, Grattan, Parnell. He was poet, playwright, guiding spirit of the famed Abbey Theatre, essayist, philoso­pher, statesman, mystic. But, as he once wrote, “The intellect of man is forced to choose “Perfection of the life, or of the work” ["The Choice"], and it is primarily in his poetry that most people seek an understanding of his genius.

Some of his views confounded the mediocre, left-wing poets and intellectuals who sought him out in his later years. Unable, of course, to ignore him, they attempted to appropriate him as their own, much as Walter Kaufmann, a Jew, attempted to do with Friedrich Nietzsche some years later. Thus, many writings about Yeats totally ignore his more “controver­sial” ideas, or at best refer to them only obliquely.

For example, Yeats believed in reincarnation, not only in a poet’s way, as a dramatic symbol. but quite literally: the individual human spirit remained a part of the collective race-soul even after the body died, and as long as the race endured the individual spirit might re-emerge later in another body. In an early poem, written when he was about 24, we have:

“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
‘That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.

– “Ephemera”

And just a few months before his death in 1939 at age 73, with matured powers of creative expression:

Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knock him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

– “Under Ben Bulben”

Modern liberalism and democracy were anathema to Yeats’s aristocratic spirit. He was a good friend of Ezra Pound. He was associated for a time with the Irish Blueshirts, led by General O’Duffy, and he wrote some marching songs for them. He spoke of “Mussolini’s incomparable Fascisti” (although being the kind of man he was he recoiled somewhat from the demagogic elements of fascist movements).

He read widely and avidly on race, eugenics, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism. On eugenics, according to his biographer, Yeats “spoke much of the necessity of the unification of the State under a small aristocratic order which would prevent the materially and spiritually uncreative families and individuals from prevailing over the creative.”[1] Eugenics, to Yeats, had both physical and spiritual aspects, It is touched upon in some of the poems. In “Under Ben Bulben” he wrote:

Poet and sculptor, do the work
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.

A much earlier poem reads:

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold.
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

– “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart”

Yeats did not write for scholars, but for the people, and schoolchildren throughout the English-speaking world are familiar with at least a few of his works–or, perhaps, just a line or a phrase from them. Many youngsters have recited in school this verse by the young Yeats:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

– “Down by the Salley Gardens”

Another favorite is ”The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” During his many tours of the United States, every American audience insisted he recite it for them:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattle made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Nearly as familiar is the stark vision of “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

People with a liberal mind set have often quoted this last poem, but some do so with a certain amount of unease, and rightly. Accepting historical necessity, Yeats is not, as the American Jewish critic Harold Bloom pointed out, necessarily averse to this “rough beast.”[2]

Thus, liberal critics are never completely comfortable in the company of Yeats. In “Under Ben Bulben,” one of Yeats’s last poems and a general summary of his ideas, he writes:

You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

Bloom charged that Yeats “abused the Romantic tradition” in these lines. But Yeats would have shown Bloom the contempt he deserves; in one of Yeats’s letters we can read: “I am full of life and not too disturbed by the enemies I must make. This is the proposition on which I write: There is now overwhelming evidence that man stands between eternities, that of his family and that of his soul. I apply those beliefs to literature and politics and show the change they must make. . . . My belief must go into what I write, even if I estrange friends; some when they see my meaning set out in plain print will hate me for poems which they have thought meant nothing.”

Earlier Yeats had written of war, politics, and pleasant but self-defeating illusions. In “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” he surveyed both the halcyon pre-World War I years and the grim aftermath of war, civil war, and revolution:

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thoughts we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out. . . .

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

Yeats himself did not take an active part in the Irish civil war, and he may have felt a certain uneasiness about the physical side of the struggle:

An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.

– “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

Yeats, it is true, spent much time contemplating and expressing himself on the great problems of the age and of the individual living in this age, but he never strayed far from whimsy. As typical of his poetry as anything he wrote is the neatly lyrical “To Anne Gregory,” addressed to the granddaughter of his friend and fellow playwright Lady Augusta Gregory:

“Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-colored
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair:

“But I can get a hair-dye
And set such color there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

“I heard an old religious man
But yestemight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.”

I know of no English or American poet writing today who can approach even remotely Yeats’s lyrical power or his poetic shaping of strong and startling ideas. Most of today’s poets are professors of English or fine arts who grind out pedestrian or pretentious drivel, presumably for prestige within the academic commu­nity. And it is hardly conceivable that there are any campus publications, literary or otherwise, that would publish all of Yeats’s material were he writing today. What, for instance, would they do with these lines from “John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs. Mary Moore”?:

Though stiff to strike a bargain,
Like an old Jew man,
Her bargain struck we laughed and talked
And emptied many a can . . . .

Perhaps Yeats was the culmination of that great, surging Romantic wave, now in recession.

Though the great song return no more
There’s keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

– “The Nineteenth Century and After”

Perhaps. And perhaps a revitalized and resurgent West can at least produce poets in the great tradition, who refuse to wallow in mud and make a career of destroying our language.

Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

– “Under Ben Bulben”

These lines also proved upsetting to Bloom, and understandably. Yeats here issues a clear tribal call for cultural unity by appealing to racial instinct and historical experience: blood and soil. A Jewish critic, who had never shared in the experience, but rather was steeped in another totally alien, and thus had no real comprehension of the soul-state from which the poet spoke, would, as a matter of course, feel hostile to such verse. Too bad for Bloom and his fellows that Yeats’s reputation is already established; they have now little other to do but to wring their hands and rend their garments in their studies.

William Butler Yeats: rooted in Ireland, a seeker in the Western tradition, a giant of our race and culture; like Nietzsche, a “conqueror of Time”; and, perchance, one of the heralds of the times to come:

O silver trumpets, be you lifted up
And cry to the great race that is to come.
Long-throated swans upon the waves of time,
Sing loudly, for beyond the wall of the world
That race may hear our music and awake.

– “The King’s Threshold”

Notes

[1] Joseph M. Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (1943).

[2] Harold Bloom, Yeats (1972).

Roy Campbell

Kerry Bolton

 

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

Roy Campbell was born in October 1902 in the Natal District of South Africa. He enjoyed an idyllic childhood, growing up in South Africa and being imbued as much with Zulu traditions and language as with his Scottish heritage. He showed early talent as an artist but an interest in literature including poetry soon became predominant.

In 1918 he traveled to England to attend Oxford where by this time he was an agnostic with a love for the Elizabethan literature. Campbell’s friendship with the composer William Walton at Oxford brought him into contact with the literati including T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells and Wyndham Lewis. He was by now reading Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche, and had a distaste for Anglo-Saxonism and the ‘drabness of England’ and found an affinity with the Celts. He also identified with the Futurist movement in the arts. Campbell writes at this time in a manner suggesting the Classicism of Hulme, Lewis, Pound, and the Vorticists.

Art is not developed by a lot of long-haired fools in velvet jackets. It develops itself and pulls those fools wherever it wants them to go . . .  Futurism is the reaction caused by the faintness, the morbid wistfulness of the symbolists. It is hard, cruel and glaring, but always robust and healthy.

Campbell continues by describing the new art in Nietzschean and Darwinian terms of struggle, survival and victory, but also suggesting something of his own colonial character:

It is art pulling itself together for another tremendous fight against annihilation. It is wild, distorted, and ugly, like a wrestler coming back for a last tussle against his opponent. The muscles are contorted and rugged, the eyes bulge, and the legs stagger. But there it is, and it has won the victory.

Campbell escaped from England’s ‘drabness’ to Provence where he worked on fishing boats and picked grapes. Despite his agnosticism he was impressed by the simple faith of the peasants, and started writing poems of a religious nature such as Saint Peter of the Candles—the Fisher’s Prayer, which took ten years to complete and portrays Campbell’s spiritual odyssey He returned to London in 1921, married Mary Garman, and became highly regarded among the Bloomsbury coterie who were impressed with his rough manners and hard drinking.

His wife inspired his first epic poem The Flaming Terrapin, written while the couple lived for over a year at a remote Welsh village where their first daughter was born. T. E. Lawrence was immediately impressed with the poem and took it to Jonathan Cape for publication. This established Campbell’s reputation as a poet.

Nietzsche, Christ, & the Heroic Poet
 

The Flaming Terrapin is a combination of Christianity and Nietzsche. In a letter to his parents Campbell sought to explain the symbolism as being founded on Christ’s statement: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is, hewn down and cast into fire,” and “Ye are the salt of the earth but if that salt shall have lost its savor it shall he scattered abroad and trodden under the feet of men.”

Campbell now realized that Christ, was the first to “proclaim the doctrine of heredity and survival of the fittest,” and that his “aristocratic outlook” was misunderstood by Nietzsche as being a religion of the weak. World War I had destroyed the best breeding stock and demoralized humanity. The Russians for example had succumbed to Bolshevism. But Campbell hoped that a portion might have become ennobled from the suffering.

He continued to explain that the deluge in The Flaming Terrapin represents the World War, and that the Noah family represents “the survival of the fittest,” triumphing over the terrors of the storm to colonize the earth. The terrapin in eastern tradition is the tortoise that represents “strength, longevity, endurance and courage” and is the symbol of the universe. It is this “flaming terrapin” that tows the Ark, and wherever he crawls upon the earth creation blossoms forth. He is “masculine energy” and where his voice roars man springs forth from the soil. His acts of creation are born from “action and flesh in one clean fusion.”

The poem published in 1924 in Britain and the USA received critical acclaim from the press as a fresh and youthful breath, as breaking free from both the banalities of the past and from the skeptical nihilism of the new generation. Campbell and his family returned to South Africa where he was welcomed as a celebrity. Here Campbell lectured on Nietzsche, and praised Nietzsche’s condemnation of the meanness of modern democracy. In this lecture Campbell also attacked the ascendancy of technology, stating that the rush to progress and enthronement of science during the previous century has outpaced mans’ mental and moral faculties and that man has becoming suddenly “lost.”

All those useful mechanical toys which man primarily invented for his own convenience have begun to tyrannize every moment of his life.

This was a theme that concerned Campbell throughout his life. In a poem written a year later entailed The Serf, Campbell proclaimed the tiller of the soil as “timeless” as he “plows down palaces and thrones and towers.” The tiller of the soil, states a hopeful Campbell, endures through eternity while the cycles of history rise and fall around him. This gives a sense of permanence in a constantly shifting world.

His poem in honor to his wife Dedication to Mary Campbell is Nietzschean in theme but also a criticism of his fellow South Africa, referring to the poet as “living by sterner laws,” as not concerned with their commerce, and as worshiping a god “superbly stronger than their own.”

Estranged from South Africans

In 1925 he became editor of Voorslag and was closely associated with William Plomer whose first novel Turbott Wolfe involves inter-racial marriage. However, despite their friendship and Campbell’s disdain for the racial situation in South Africa he reviewed Plomer’s novel and found it having “a very strong bias against the white colonists.” Nevertheless, Campbell was not impressed by what he considered as white South Africa, “reclining blissfully in a grocer’s paradise on the labor of the natives.”

Campbell resigned from editorship after the publisher’s interference. Some of Campbell’s best poems written in South Africa at this time are considered to be among his best. To a Pet Cobra returns to Nietzschean themes, describing poets in heroic terms, the Zarathustrian solitary atop the mountain peaks.

There shines upon the topmost peak of peril
There is not joy like them who fight alone
And in their solitude a tower of pride

Bloomsbury & Provence

On their return to Britain Campbell and his wife were introduced to the Bloomsbury coterie, including the poetess Vita Sackville-West her husband the novelist Harold Nicolson, Virginia and Leonard Wolfe, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, et al. The robust Campbell found their refined manners, pervasive homosexuality, and pretentiousness sickening, writing in Some Thoughts on Bloomsbury that his own voice is the only one he likes to hear when around all the “clever people.” Several years later in The Georgiad he satirizes the dinner parties of Bloomsbury where wishing to stop the ‘din’ of his ‘dizzy’; head he imagines stuffing his ears with meat and bread, and wishes the diners would choke on their food that their chattering would be halted.

In 1928 the Campbells returned to Provence. The atmosphere was altogether different from England and the wealthy socialist intelligentsia from which he sought escape. The Campbells fully involved themselves in the community, celebrated the harvest feasts, and welcomed the local folk into their home. Campbell became a celebrated figure in the dangerous sport of “water jousting.” He also assisted in the ring at bullfights. Campbell found in the customs and culture of the Provencal villagers stability and permanence in a changing world obsessed by science and “progress.” His own aesthetics, at the basis of his rejection of liberalism and socialism, was a synthesis of the romanticism of Provence and the Classicism of the Graeco-Roman. He admired Caesar and the stoicism and martial ethos of the ancients. His ideal was a combination of aesthete and athlete.

In Taurine Provence, published in 1932 Campbell writes of this:

So men in whom the heroic principle works will be driven by their very excess of vitality to flaunt their defiance in the face of death or danger, as in the modern arena.

Campbell, freed from the English intelligentsia, now renewed his attack with fury. Writing in 1928 in Scrutinies by Various Writers, he states that the dominant philosophy of the contemporary writer is dictated by “fear of discomfort, excitement or pain than by love of life.” His attack on the “sex-socialism” of Bloomsbury as being flabby and effete is contrasted with his own robust nature that could not fit in with the simpering and decadent atmosphere of the intellectual. Following on from Wyndham Lewis’ scathing attack on Bloomsbury, The Apes of God, which Campbell enjoyed immensely, Campbell wrote The Georgiad in 1931, as his own broadside. This would bring against him the mixture of condemnation and silence that the intellectual coterie had been using against Wyndham Lewis.

The Georgiad expresses Campbell’s disdain for the way Bloomsbury makes sickly everything it touches. Campbell compares his own ‘hate’ with that of their “dribbles.”

Like lukewarm bilge out of a running leak
Scented with lavender and stale cologne
Lest by its true effluvium should be known
The stagnant depth of envy that you swim in,
Who hate like gigolos and fight like women.

Bulwark of Christendom

In 1933 the Campbells left Provence for Spain due to financial hardship, despite the success of Campbell’s acclaimed volume of poems Adamastor, published in both the USA and England. This was the final work to be well-received from the Bloomsbury crowd, while his Georgiad received what The Times Literary Supplement was to recall in 1950 as a “conspiracy of silence.”

The Campbells arrived at Barcelona where a right-wing electoral victory resulted in strikes and violence by the anarchists and where machine guns were much in evidence on the streets. However, the Campbells were greatly impressed by the traditional Catholic culture.

Campbell described himself for the first time as a “Catholic” in his 1933 autobiography Broken Record, attacking both English Protestantism as “a cowardly form of atheism” and the Freudianism that pervaded the Bloomsbury progressives. He contrasted this with the “traditional human values” that continued to form the basis of Spanish culture. Broken Record was a break with modernism, but still lacked a coherent philosophy.

Despite the reference to Catholicism, Campbell had not yet converted, but spiritual questions had long occupied him, with an interest in Mithraism emerging in Provence. This cult was still to be seen in the shrines of Provence. That it was the religion most favored by the Roman legions, with its strong martial ethos, together with the mythos of the bull, appealed to Campbell.

However, he had also been strongly impressed with the faith and traditionalism of the fishermen and farmers among whom he had been so popular in Provence. His Mithraic Sonnets are a reflection of Campbell’s own spiritual odyssey beginning with Mithras and ending with the triumph of Christ, a mixture of the two religions. The Mithraic conquering sun. Sol Invictus, the byword of the Roman legions, becomes transmogrified as the Sun of the Son of God, “the shining orb” reflecting as a mirrored shield the image of Christ. It is with these vague feelings towards Christianity and Catholic culture that the Campbells moved south to the rural village of Altea in 1934.

Campbell continued to sing the song of Catholicism in martial terms, of the solar Christ as “captain” winning the battle of faith. Spain breathes its Catholic tradition and in The Fight Campbell writes again with a martial flavor, an aerial dog-fight for Campbell’s soul; his “red self” of atheism shot down by the “white self” of the Solar Christ, “the unknown pilot.” At Altea, Campbell was again impressed with the “freshness, bravery and reverence” of the people Under such an impress the whole Campbell family, actually at the initiative of his wife, converted in 1935, received by the village priest Father Gregorio.

His daughter Anna related many years later, that for Campbell, Spain was the last country left in Europe that was still a pastoral society while much of the rest had become industrialized under the impress of Protestantism. Such was Campbell’s aversion to machinery that he never learnt to drive or even used a typewriter.

At this time Campbell wrote Rust. The rust of time that brings ruin to the intentions of those who would industrialize and modernize:

So there, and there it gnaws, the Rust,
Shall grind their pylons into dust . . .

Lackeys of Capitalism

Campbell’s political outlook becomes coherent with his religious conversion. An article published in 1935 in the South African magazine The Critic shows just how clear Campbell’s knowledge of politics now was:

The artist as romantic ‘rebel’ is the tamest mule imaginable. He dates from the industrial era and has been politicized to play into the hands of the great syndicates and cartels. First by dogmatizing immorality, breaking up the “Family,” that one definitive unit that have withstood the whole effort of centuries to enslave, dehumanize and mechanize the individual, thereby cheapening and multiplying labor. It is the “Intellectual” which had been chiefly politicized into selling his fellow mates to capitalism, whether the capitalism be disguised as a vast inhuman state [as in the USSR under communism] or whether a gang of individuals. The last century has seen more class-wars, and wars between generations, than any other period. They have been deliberately fostered by capitalism, of which bolshevism is merely an anonymous form. Divide and rule, said Cicero: encourage your slaves to quarrel and your authority will be supreme. A thousand artists and reformers with the highest ideals have leaped ignorantly and romantically into these rackets, and by means of causing hate between man and woman, father and son, class and class, white and black, almost irretrievably embroiled the human individual in profitless, exhausting struggles which leave him at the mercy of the unscrupulous few.

In 1936 Campbell met British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, at the suggestion of Wyndham Lewis. Although Campbell declined to join Mosley as British Fascism’s official poet, his poetry was to appear in Mosley’s magazines both before and after the War.

Toledo, the Sacred City

The Campbells next moved to Toldeo, which had been Spain’s capital under Charles V during the Holy Roman Empire. The city was isolated and timeless, medieval, full of churches, monasteries, convents, and shrines. The old Fortress, the Alcazar, designed to play a pivotal role in the defense of Christendom against Bolshevism, served as a military academy. The city was full of priests, nuns, monks, and soldiers, a combination of the religious, the military, and the traditional that prompted Campbell to call Toldeo the “sacred city of the mind.”

The assumption to power of the Left-wing Popular Front resulted in the release of communist and anarchist revolutionaries from gaol amidst increasing political violence in Madrid and Barcelona and street fighting between Left-wing and Right-wing factions. Churches were now being desecrated and destroyed throughout Spain. The violence reached Toledo where priests and monks were attacked and a church set ablaze.

The Campbells sheltered several Carmelite monks in their home. Campbell, well known for his anti-Bolshevik views and for his faith, was severely beaten by Government “red” guards and paraded through the streets to police headquarters. His gypsy friend, with whom he was riding at the time of his capture, “Mosquito” Bargas, was murdered at the time of the arrest. Campbell was probably spared this fate by being a foreigner. In his tribute to his friend In Memoriam of Mosquito, Campbell writes with typical stoicism and faith when beaten bloody and dragged through Toledo:

I never felt such glory
As handcuffs on my wrists.
My body stunned and gory
With tooth marks on my wrists . . .

While Spain was on the verge of civil war the Campbells were confirmed into the Church by Cardinal Goma, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, in a secret ceremony.

In July 1938 the Government’s red guards killed parliamentary opposition leader Calvo Sotel, the leader of the monarchists. Four days later the military under General Franco revolted against the Government to restore order and liberty of worship. With the Alcazar being a military academy, Toldeo was easily taken by Nationalist troops, and peasants from the surrounding countryside fled to the city for refuge. The Government militia from Madrid prepared to attack Toledo, and the Alcazar was bombed and shelled. The Campbells hid the archives of the Carmelite monks at their home for the duration of the civil war.

Seventeen Carmelite monks were herded into the streets by the red forces and shot. Among them was the Campbell’s father confessor who died with a smile and the shout of “Long live Christ’ Long live Spain!” (Father Easebio who had received the Campbells into the Church was also killed).

In Campbell’s excursion into the city he came across the Carmelites lying in the street and found the bodies of the Marista monks. Smeared in their blood on a wall was: “Thus strike and Cheka,” a reference to the Soviet secret police. In the city square religious artifacts from churches and private homes were tossed onto bonfires.

In the besieged Alaczar were 1000 soldiers and 700 civilians, mostly women and children. Under the Command of Colonel Moscardo they held out, even as the Colonel’s 24-year-old son Louis, captured by the Red forces, was compelled to telephone his father and say that he would be shot unless Alcazar was surrendered. In an epic of heroism and martyrdom that helped make Alcazar a shrine to this day the Colonel replied to his son: “Commend your soul to God, shout ‘Viva Espana!’ And die like a hero. The Alcazar will never surrender.”

The Campbells left Spain and returned to London. They felt isolated in England where most of the literati supported the “Left” in the Spanish civil war. The family soon moved to a fishing village in Portugal, a nation that retained the same spirit of faith and tradition as Spain.

Campbell returned to Spain as a correspondent for the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet and was given safe conduct to the Madrid front. His desire to enlist in the Nationalist forces was unsuccessful as the Nationalist authorities were insistent that he could do more good for the cause as a writer. He was decorated for saving life under fire on multiple occasions, met Franco, and was present at the Nationalist victory parade in Madrid.

The Civil War was to result in the murder of 12 bishops. 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks, and around 300 nuns. George Orwell who had gone to Spain along with others of the literati to fight with the Reds, was to remark that, “Churches were pillaged everywhere as a matter of course in six months in Spain I only saw two undamaged churches” (Homage to Catalonia).

Flowering Rifle

Campbell’s epic saga Flowering Rifle is a detailed explanation of his poetical credo, a tribute to his Catholicism, to Spain’s faith and martyrdom and also a condemnation of the British intelligentsia. It his introductory note Campbell explains that “humanitarianism” is the “ruling passion” of the British intelligentsia which

sides automatically with the Dog against the Man, the Jew against the Christian, the black against the white, the servant against the master, the criminal against the judge.

As a form of “moral perversion” it was natural that such humanitarians sided with Bolshevik mass murderers. The poem begins with a description of the (fascist) salute, the “opening palm, of victory” the sign, of “palms triumphant foresting the day.” By contrast is the clenched fist of communism, “a Life-constricting tetanus of fingers,” the sign of an “outworn age” under which “all must starve under the lowest Caste.” The Bloomsbury intelligentsia represents the connection between capitalism and communism. Behind these stand “the Yiddisher’s convulsive gold”: one of many allusions to the prominent role played by Jews in Communism and in the International Brigades.

Spain is heralded as a resurrected nation that might show the rest of Europe the path to regeneration and stand against Bolshevism “which no godless democracy could quell.” The martyrs of the Nationalist cause are described in mystical terms, each death “a splinter of the Cross,” each body building a Cathedral to the sky. Nobility is achieved through suffering and sacrifice, as Christ, the “Captain” suffered. But when suffering and sacrifice are eliminated from life mankind is “shunned by the angels as effete baboons.”

Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the Falangists who had been shot without trial while in the custody of the Leftist Government, was similarly eulogized:

Whose phoenix blood in generous libation
With fiery zest rejuvenates the nation . . .

The Marxist deaths on the other hand were vacuous, for their gods are economics, science, gold, and sex, and as exponents of abortion and birth control they are the essence of anti-life. But capitalism, is just as much a debasement of man, as communism:

To cheapen thus for slavery and hire
The racket of the Invert and the Jew
Which is through art and science to subdue.
Humiliate, and to pulp reduce
The Human Spirit for industrial use
Whether by Capital or by Communism
It’s all the same despite their seeming schisms

Those who are debased the most are, under democracy, elevated to positions of honor and state, elected by the voting masses who are mesmerized by the media and the literati, the politicians hang about the League of Nations

That sheeny club of communists and masons
He bombs the Arabs, when his Jews invade.

Britannia’s trident had become a “graveyard spade” while condemning Germany and Italy. “Who from the dead have raised more vital forces…” Franco, Mussolini, and Portugal’s Salazar had “muzzled up the soul destroying lie” of communism, and as Spain had shown, victory would come through nationhood, not League sanctions, wealth or arms. Meanwhile Britain shunned its unbought men, such as Campbell who brings “the tidings that Democracy is dead.”

When the Campbells traveled to Italy in 1938 the exiled Spanish king Alfonso XIII, who was greatly impressed with Flowering Rifle, cordially greeted them. Of course the British literati were outraged, and even some Catholics felt the poem lacked “charity.”

War Service

Campbell and his wife returned to Toledo in 1939, the Nationalists having triumphed. But there was now widespread famine. Mary opened a soup kitchen and refurbished the damaged chapel, and both literally gave their clothes away to help the distressed inhabitants. As the world war approached Campbell considered that there would be two great contending forces: Fascism and Communism. With the exception of what he considered to be a pagan orientation in Germany, the Fascist states were eminently Christian and allowed Christians the right to live, whereas Bolshevism simply killed and degraded everything, being the enemy of every form of religion.

However, despite his antagonism to the English bourgeoisie and democratic Britain, Campbell always had an admiration for the heroic spirit of the British Empire and a feeling for those Britons facing an enemy. He sought to enlist, although under no illusions about the justice of the Allied cause. His animosity by this time was against all systems, fascism, democracy, and bolshevism, which he dubbed as Fascidemoshevism.

His ideal was not the cumbersome state of any of these systems but that of small, self-reliant and co-operating, family based communities, like those he had experienced in Provence, Spain, and Portugal.

In the Moon of Short Rations Campbell considered the Allied cause to be that of both socialism and the multi-national corporations, twin figures of a universal sameness. He saw that the post-war world would be ever more depersonalized and mechanical. Campbell could not sit still or take a soft option as a number of his pro-war Left-wing intellectual accusers were doing while Britons marched to war. He lampooned these hypocrites such as Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis who had a job in the Ministry of Information, when they attacked his “fascism,” and he wrote The Volunteer’s Reply to the Poet stating:

It will be the same, but a bloody sight worse . . .
Since you have a hand in the game . . .
You coin us the catchwords and phrases
For which to be slaughtered . . .

However, because of his age and a bad hip Campbell, had to be content with the home guard until 1942 when he was recruited into the Army Intelligence Corps due to his skills in languages. Britain in wartime had in Campbell’s view awakened from its “drabness” to become again a “warrior nation.” Campbell was popular with the troops as a “grandfatherly” figure, and was stationed in East Africa. Contracting malaria and with a deteriorating hip condition necessitating the use of a cane, he was discharged with an “excellent military record”

The Post-War World

The England of the post-war years returned to its drab routine and worse still for Campbell, the prospects of an all-consuming welfare state. Campbell soon went back into fighting mode against the Left-wing poets with The Talking Bronco (a name that Spender had applied to him). Even Vita Sackville-West, calling Campbell “one of our most considerable living poets” acclaimed this volume. Desmond McCarthy writing in The Sunday Times regarded Campbell as “the most democratic poet,” not politically, but in his feeling for the common man and for the common soldier. Others were of course outraged. Cecil Day-Lewis believed Campbell should be sacked as a “fascist” from the job he now had as producer of the BBC talk programs, since he was not fit to “direct any civilized form of cultural expression.”

Campbell was horrified by the Allied victory that had placed half of Europe under the USSR. However, he was equally horrified by the rest of the world falling under the dominion of the multinational corporations and their creed of global consumerism, or what we today call globalization. For Campbell the Cold War was a contention between two equally internationalist forces.

His daughter Anna wrote in 1999 that Campbell admired all types of ethnic civilization as opposed to the mass conformity of Marxism and the globalization of the likes of MacDonalds and Coca-Cola. His concern was in “everything becoming the same.” He would have been “horrified by what the world has become now” she wrote.

Despite Campbell’s sensitivity to being called a “fascist,” he was unapologetically a man of the “Right,” of tradition and nationalism, and continued to forthrightly expound this position after the war in his poetry and essays. Writing in “A Decade in Retrospect” in the Jesuit journal The Month May 1950, he refers to the “Gaderene stampede” of progress for the want of two sensible standbys (a brake and a steering wheel). In “Tradition and Reaction,” he writes: “A body without reactions is a corpse. So is a Society without Tradition.”

In 1949 Campbell left his job with the BBC to take over the editorship of The Catacomb, founded by his close friend the poet Rob Lyie as a defense of Catholic and Classical traditions against socialism and secularism.

The Catacomb stopped publication in 1951. In 1952 the family moved to Portugal. Before leaving England, Campbell got together with a number of South African literary friends and signed an open letter to the South African Government protesting voting restrictions on the colored population. However, Campbell’s misgivings about the South African situation were not prompted by the liberal desire for a democratic, monocultural state. He feared that antagonism between the races would result in Bolshevism and the destruction of his rustic ideal. With the advent of Black rule, free market capitalism was ushered in on the wings of Marxism and revolution. Today the ANC today calls globalization and trade liberalization the “correct path to Marxism-Leninism.”

In 1954 his views on his native land were given when accepting an honorary doctorate from Natal. In an off the cuff speech, much to the embarrassment of the liberal audience, he defended South Africa against England’s condemnation of apartheid, ridiculing Churchill and Roosevelt, who had sold “two hundred million natives of Europe” to the far worse slavery of bolshevism.

While in the USA on a speaking tour he praised “the two greatest Yanks” Senator McCarthy and General MacArthur.

In April 1957 returning from Spain, Campbell and his wife had a motor accident. Campbell’s neck was broken, and he died at the scene. Mary survived him by 22 years.

Edith Sitwell who converted to Catholicism through the example of the Campbells, remarked: “He died as he had lived, like a flash of lightning.”

Henry Williamson: Nature’s Visionary

Mark Deavin

 

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

The fact that the name of Henry Williamson is today so little known across the White world is a sad reflection of the extent to which Western man has allowed himself to be deprived of his culture and identity over the last 50 years. Until the Second World War Williamson was generally regarded as one of the great English Nature writers, possessing a unique ability to capture the essential essence and meaning of the natural world in all its variety and forms.

His most famous Nature book, Tarka the Otter, was published in 1927 and became one of the best-loved children’s books of all time, with its vivid descriptions of animal and woodland life in the English countryside. It was publicly praised by leading English literary figures such as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Hardy called Tarka a “remarkable book,” while Bennett declared it to be “marvelous.” Even T. E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, admitted that “the book did move me and gratify me profoundly.”

Tarka was awarded the coveted Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 and eventually attracted the interest of Walt Disney, who offered a small fortune for the film rights. Williamson, however, was concerned that such an arrangement might compromise his artistic integrity, and he rejected the offer.

Seventy years later, however, Tarka, like the majority of Williamson’s books, is relatively unknown and has only just become available in print again. The reason: Like several other leading European authors, Williamson was a victim of the Second World War. Not only did his naturalistic message conflict with the materialistic culture that has pervaded the Western world since 1945, but he himself was a political fighter who actively opposed the war on ideological grounds.

Born in Brockley, southeast London, in December 1895, Williamson was educated at Colfe’s Grammar School, Lewisham. He spent much of his early life exploring the nearby Kent countryside, where his love of Nature and animals and his artistic awareness and sensitivity were first stimulated. Never satisfied unless he had seen things for himself, he always made sure that he studied things closely enough to get the letter as well as the spirit of reality. This enabled him to develop a microscopic observational ability which came to dominate his life.

Williamson joined the British Army at the outbreak of war in 1914 and fought at the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, where he was seriously wounded. It was this experience as a frontline soldier which was the redefining moment in his life and artistic development, stimulating in him a lifelong Faustian striving to experience and comprehend the “life flow” permeating his own, and all, existence.

His spiritual development continued after the war. In 1919 he read for the first time the visionary The Story of My Heart, which was written by the English Nature writer Richard Jefferies and published in 1893. For Williamson, discovering Jefferies acted as a liberation of his consciousness, stimulating all the stored impressions of his life to return and reveal a previously smothered and overlaid self. It was not just an individual self that he discovered, however, but a racial self in which he began to recognize his existence as but a link in an eternal chain that reached back into the mists of time, and which — if it were permitted — would carry on forever.

Williamson sensed this truth in his own feeling of oneness with Nature and the ancient, living, breathing Universe as represented by the life-giving sun. It also was reflected in his idea of mystical union between the eternal sunlight and the long history of the earth. For Williamson the ancient light of the sun was something “born in me” and represented the real meaning of his own existence by illuminating his ancestral past and revealing the truth of redemption through Nature. Like Jefferies before him, Williamson “came to feel the long life of the earth back in the dimmest past while the sun of the moment was warm on me … This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness. From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the sunbeams had continually found an earth.” [1]

After the war Williamson became a journalist for a time while beginning work on his first novel, The Beautiful Years (1922). Finally he decided to break all contact with London and in 1922 moved to an ancient cottage in Georgham, North Devon, which had been built in the days of King John. Living alone and in hermit fashion at first, Williamson disciplined himself to study Nature with the same meticulous observations as Jefferies, tramping about the countryside and often sleeping out. The door and windows of the cottage were never closed, and his strange family of dogs and cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies, and one otter cub were free to come and go as they chose.

It was his experiences with the otter cub which stimulated Williamson to write Tarka. He had rescued it after its mother had been shot by a farmer, and he saved its life by persuading his cat to suckle it along with her kitten. Eventually the otter cub was domesticated and became Williamson’s constant companion, following him around like a dog. On one walk, however, it walked into a rabbit trap, panicked, and ran off. Williamson spent years following otters’ haunts in the rivers Taw and Torridge, hunting for his lost pet.

The search was in vain, but his intimate contact with the animal world gave him the inspiration for Tarka: “The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone. His fur was soft and grey as the buds of the willow before they open up at Eastertide. He was called Tarka, which was the name given to the otters many years ago by men dwelling in hut circles on the moor. It means Little Water Wanderer, or Wandering as Water.”

Williamson never attempted to pass any kind of moral judgment on Nature and described its evolutionary realities in a manner reminiscent of Jack London:

Long ago, when moose roamed in the forest at the mountain of the Two Rivers, otters had followed eels migrating from ponds and swamps to the seas. They had followed them into shallow waters; and one fierce old dog had run through the water so often that he swam, and later, in his great hunger, had put under his head to seize them so often that he dived. Other otters had imitated him. The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago. Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct.

Williamson actually rewrote Tarka 17 times, “always and only for the sake of a greater truth.” [2] Mere polishing for grace and expression or literary style did not interest him, and he strove always to illuminate a scene or incident with what he considered was authentic sunlight.

He also believed that European man could be spiritually healthy and alive to his destiny only by living in close accord with Nature. Near the end of Tarka, for instance, he delightfully describes how “a scarlet dragonfly whirred and darted over the willow snag, watched by a girl sitting on the bank … Glancing round, she realized that she alone had seen the otter. She flushed, and hid her grey eyes with her lashes. Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.”

Williamson’s sequel to Tarka was Salar the Salmon, which was also the result of many months of intimate research and observation of Nature in the English countryside. Then came The Lone Swallow, The Peregrine’s Saga, Life in a Devon Village, and A Clear Water Stream, all of which, in the eyes of the English writer Naomi Lewis, displayed “a crystal intensity of observation and a compelling use of words, which exactly match the movement and life that he describes.”

To Williamson himself, however, his Nature stories were not the most important part of his literary output. His greatest effort went into his two semi-autobiographical novel groups, the tetralogy collected as The Flax of Dreams, which occupied him for most of the 1920s, and the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, which began with The Dark Lantern in 1951 and ended with The Gale of the World in 1969.

Williamson’s experiences during the First World War had politicized him for life. A significant catalyst in this development was the Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German frontline soldiers spontaneously left their trenches, abandoned the fighting, and openly greeted each other as brothers.

Williamson later spoke of an “incoherent sudden realization, after the fraternization of Christmas Day, that the whole war was based on lies.” Another experience that consolidated this belief was when a German officer helped him remove a wounded British soldier who was draped over barbed wire on the front line. He was thus able to contrast his own wartime experiences with the vicious anti-German propaganda orchestrated by the British political establishment both during and after the war, and he was able to recognize the increasing moral bankruptcy of that establishment. In Williamson’s view the fact that over half of the 338 Conservative Members of Parliament who dominated the 1918 governing coalition were company directors and financiers who had grown rich from war profits was morally wrong and detestable.

This recognition, in itself a reflection of an already highly developed sense of altruism, meant that Williamson could never be content with just isolating himself in the countryside. He had to act to try to change the world for the better. Perhaps not surprisingly he came to see in the idea of National Socialism a creed which not only represented his own philosophy of life, but which offered the chance of practical salvation for Western Civilization. He saw it as evolving directly from the almost religious transcendence which he, and thousands of soldiers of both sides, had experienced in the trenches of the First World War. This transcendence resulted in a determination that the “White Giants” of Britain and Germany would never go to war against each other again, and it rekindled a sense of racial kinship and unity of the Nordic peoples over and above separate class and national loyalties. [3]

Consequently, not only was Williamson one of the first of the “phoenix generation” to swear allegiance to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, but he quickly came to believe that National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, pointed the way forward for European man. Williamson identified closely with Hitler — “the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child,” seeing him as a light-bringing phoenix risen from the chaos of European civilization in order to bring a millennium of youth to the dying Western world. [4]

Williamson visited Germany in 1935 to attend the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and saw there the beginnings of the “land fit for heroes” which had been falsely promised the young men of Britain during the First World War by the government’s war propagandists. He was very impressed by the fact that, while the British people continued to languish in poverty and mass unemployment, National Socialism had created work for seven million unemployed, abolished begging, freed the farmers from the mortgages which had strangled production, developed laws on conservation, and, most importantly, had developed in a short period of time a deep sense of racial community. [5]

Inspired to base their lives on a religious idea, Williamson believed that the German people had been reborn with a spiritual awareness and physical quality that he himself had long sought. Everywhere he saw “faces that looked to be breathing extra oxygen; people free from mental fear.” [6]

Through the Hitler Youth movement, which brought back fond memories of his own time as a Boy Scout, he recognized “the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the suntan, the clear eye, the broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being.”

In Hitler’s movement Williamson identified not only an idea consistent with Nature’s higher purpose to create order out of chaos, but the physical encapsulation of a striving toward Godhood. Influenced by his own lifelong striving for perfection, Williamson believed that the National Socialists represented “a race that moves on the poles of mystic, sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance … Everything is of the blood, of the senses.” [7]

Williamson always believed that any spiritual improvement could only take place as a result of a physical improvement, and, like his mentor Richard Jefferies, he was a firm advocate of race improvement through eugenics. He himself was eventually to father seven children, and he decried the increasing lack of racial quality in the mass of the White population. He urged that “the physical ideal must be kept steadily in view” and called for the enforcement of a discipline and system along the lines of ancient Sparta in order to realize it. [8]

In 1936 Williamson and his family moved to Norfolk, where he threw himself into a new life as a farmer, the first three years of which are described in The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941). But with the Jews increasingly using England as a base from which to agitate for war against Germany, Williamson remained very active through his membership in the British Union of Fascists in promoting the idea of Anglo-German friendship. Until it was banned in 1940, Williamson wrote eight articles for the party newspaper Action and had 13 extracts reprinted from his book The Patriot’s Progress. He called consistently for Hitler to be given “that amity he so deserved from England,” so as to prevent another brothers’ war that would see the victory only of Asiatic Bolshevism and the enslavement of Europe. On September 24, 1939, for instance, he wrote of his continuing conviction that Hitler was “determined to do and create what is right. He is fighting evil. He is fighting for the future.”

Williamson viewed the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France as a spiteful act of an alien system that was determined to destroy the prospect of a reborn and regenerated European youth. And his continued opposition to it led to his arrest and internment in June 1940, along with Mosley and hundreds of others. His subsequent release on parole was conditional upon his taking no further action to oppose the war. Silently, however, Williamson remained true to his convictions. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been “relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive” and somewhat “purified by fire.”

National Socialism’s wartime defeat, however, dealt Williamson a heavy blow. Decrying the death struggle of “the European cousin nations” he lamented that “the hopes that have animated or agitated my living during the past thirty years and four months are dead.” [9]

Consequently, his first marriage broke up in 1947, and he returned to North Devon to live in the hilltop hut which he had bought in 1928 with the prize money from Tarka.

But it was not in Williamson’s character to give up on what he knew to be true and right, and, as his most recent biographer makes clear, he never recanted his ideas about Hitler. [10]

On the contrary, he continued to publicly espouse what he believed, and he fervently contested the postwar historical record distorted by false Jewish propaganda — even though his effort resulted, as he realized it would, in his continued literary ostracism.

In The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials. Among other things, he muses why the Allied officers who ordered the mass fire bombing of Germany, and the Soviet generals who ordered the mass rape and mass murder during the battle for Berlin, were not on trial; and whether it would ever be learned that the art treasures found in German salt mines were put there purely to be out of the way of the Allied bombing. He also questions the official view of the so called “Holocaust,” stating his belief that rather than being the result of a mass extermination plan, the deaths in German concentration camps were actually caused by typhus brought about by the destruction of all public utility systems by Allied bombing.

In the book Williamson also reiterates his belief that Adolf Hitler was never the real enemy of Britain. And in one scene Phillip Maddison, in conversation with his girl friend Laura, questions whether it was Hitler’s essential goodness and righteousness that was responsible for his downfall in the midst of evil and barbarity:

Laura: I have a photograph of Hitler with the last of his faithful boys outside the bunker in Berlin. He looks worn out, but he is so gentle and kind to those twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys.

Phillip: Too gentle and kind Laura … Now the faithful will be hanged.

Williamson also remained loyal in the realm of political ideas and action. When Oswald Mosley had returned to public life in Britain in 1948 by launching the Union Movement, Williamson was one of the first to give his support for an idea which he had long espoused: the unity of Western man. Contributing an article to the first issue of the movement’s magazine, The European, he called for the development of a new type of European man with a set of spiritual values that were in tune with himself and Nature.

Such positive and life-promoting thinking did not endear Williamson to the powers that be in the gray and increasingly decadent cultural climate of post-Second World War Britain. His books were ignored, and his artistic achievement remained unrecognized, with even the degrees committee at the university to which he was a benefactor twice vetoing a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate. The evidence suggests, in fact, that Williamson was subject to a prolonged campaign of literary ostracism by people inside the British establishment who believed he should be punished for his political opinions.

For Williamson, however, the machinations of trivial people in a trivial age were irrelevant; what was important was that he remained true in the eyes of posterity to himself, his ancestors, and the eternal truth which he recognized and lived by. In fact, as one observer described him during these later years, he remained a “lean, vibrant, almost quivering man with … blazing eyes, possessing an exceptional presence [and a] … continued outspoken admiration for Hitler … as a ‘great and good man.’” [11]

Certainly, Williamson knew himself, and he knew what was necessary for Western man to find himself again and to fulfill his destiny. In The Gale of the World he cited Richard Jefferies to emphasize that higher knowledge by which he led his life and by which he was convinced future generations would have to lead their lives in order to attain the heights that Nature demanded of them: “All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed in the sun, in the presence of earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the Universe. I demand that which will make me more perfect now this hour.”

Henry Williamson’s artistic legacy must endure because, as one admirer pondered in his final years, his visionary spirit and striving “came close to holding the key to life itself.”

He died on August 13, 1977, aged 81.

Notes

[1] Ann Williamson, Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic, (London, 1995), 65.

[2] Eleanor Graham, “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of Tarka the Otter (1985).

[3] Higginbottom, Intellectuals and British Fascism , (London, 1992), 10.

[4] Henry Williamson, The Flax of Dreams (London, 1936) and The Phoenix Generation (London, 1961).

[5] Henry Williamson, A Solitary War (London, 1966).

[6] Higginbotham, op. cit., 41-42.

[7] J. W. Blench, Henry Williamson and the Romantic Appeal of Fascism , (Durham, 1988).

[8] Henry Williamson, The Children of Shallow Ford, (London, 1939).

[9] Higginbotham, op. cit., 49.

[10] Ann Williamson, op. cit., 195.

[11] Higginbotham, op. cit., 53.

National Vanguard, 117 (1997), 17-20.

http://library.flawlesslogic.com/nv.html

Paganismo y filosofia de la vida en Knut Hamsun y D. H. Lawrence

Paganismo y filosofía de la vida en Knut Hamsun y D.H. Lawrence

Robert STEUCKERS

Ex: http://algaida.wordpress.com/

Knut Hamsun en "Dikterstuen", Nørholm, 1930

Robert Steuckers*

 

El filólogo húngaro Akos Doma, formado en Alemania y los Estados Unidos, acaba de publicar una obra de exégesis literaria, en el que hace un paralelismo entre las obras de Hamsun y Lawrence. El punto en común es una “crítica de la civilización”. Concepto que, obviamente, debemos aprehender en su contexto. En efecto, la civilización sería un proceso positivo desde el punto de vista de los “progresistas”, que entienden la historia de forma lineal. En efecto, los partidarios de la filosofía del Aufklärung y los adeptos incondicionales de una cierta modernidad tienden a la simplificación, la geometrización y la “cerebrización”. Sin embargo, la civilización se nos muestra como un desarrollo negativo para todos aquellos que pretenden conservar la fecundidad inconmensurable de los veneros culturales, para quienes constatan, sin escandalizarse por ello, que el tiempo es plurimorfo; es decir, que el tiempo para una cultura no coincide con el de otra, en contraposición a los iluministas quienes se afirman en la creencia de un tiempo monomorfo y aplicable a todos los pueblos y culturas del planeta. Cada pueblo tiene su propio tiempo. Si la modernidad rechaza esta pluralidad de formas del tiempo, entonces entramos irremisiblemente en el terreno de lo ilusorio. 

Desde un cierto punto de vista, explica Akos Doma, Hamsun y Lawrence son herederos de Rousseau. Pero, ¿de qué Rousseau? ¿Quién que ha sido estigmatizado por la tradición maurrasiana (Maurras, Lasserre, Muret) o aquél otro que critica radicalmente el Aufklärung sin que ello comporte defensa alguna del Antiguo Régimen? Para el Rousseau crítico con el iluminismo, la ideología moderna es, precisamente, el opuesto real del concepto ideal en su concepción de la política: aquél es antiigualitario y hostil a la libertad, aunque reivindique la igualdad y la libertad. Antes de la irrupción de la modernidad a lo largo del siglo XVIII, para Rousseau y sus seguidores prerrománticos, existiría una “comunidad sana”, la convivencia reinaría entre los hombres y la gente sería “buena” porque la naturaleza es “buena”. Más tarde, entre los románticos que, en el terreno político, son conservadores, esta noción de “bondad” seguirá estando presente, aunque en la actualidad tal característica se considere en exclusiva patrimonio de los activistas o pensadores revolucionarios. La idea de “bondad” ha estado presente tanto en la “derecha” como en “izquierda”.

Sin embargo, para el poeta romántico inglés Wordsworth, la naturaleza es “el marco de toda experiencia auténtica”, en la medida en que el hombre se enfrenta de una manera real e inmediatamente con los elementos, lo que implícitamente nos conduce más allá del bien y del mal. Wordsworth es, en cierta forma, un “perfectibilista”: el hombre fruto de su visión poética alcanza lo excelso, la perfección; pero dicho hombre, contrariamente a lo que pensaban e imponían los partidarios de las Luces, no se perfecciona sólo con el desarrollo de las facultades de su intelecto. La perfección humana requiere sobre todo pasar por la prueba de lo elemental natural. Para Novalis, la naturaleza es “el espacio de la experiencia mística, que nos permite ver más allá de las contingencias de la vida urbana y artificial”. Para Eichendorff, la naturaleza es la libertad y, en cierto sentido, una trascendencia, pues permite escapar a los corsés de las convenciones e instituciones.

Con Wordsworth, Novalis y Eichendorff, las cuestiones de lo inmediato, de la experiencia vital, del rechazo de las contingencias surgidas de la artificialidad de los convencionalismos, adquieren un importante papel. A partir del romanticismo se desarrolla en Europa, sobre todo en Europa septentrional, un movimiento hostil hacia toda forma moderna de vida social y económica. Carlyle, por ejemplo, cantará el heroísmo y denigrará a la “cash flow society”. Aparece la primera crítica contra el reino del dinero. John Ruskin, con sus proyectos de arquitectura orgánica junto a la concepción de ciudades-jardín, tratará de embellecer las ciudades y reparar los daños sociales y urbanísticos de un racionalismo que ha desembocado en puro manchesterismo. Tolstoi propone una naturalismo optimista que no tiene como punto de referencia a Dostoievski, brillante observador este último de los peores perfiles del alma humana. Gauguin transplantará su ideal de la bondad humana a la Polinesia, a Tahití, en plena naturaleza.

Hamsun y Lawrence, contrariamente a Tolstoi o a Gauguin, desarrollarán una visión de la naturaleza carente de teología, sin “buen fin”, sin espacios paradisiacos marginales: han asimilado la doble lección del pesimismo de Dostoievski y Nietzsche. La naturaleza en éstos no es un espacio idílico propicio para excursiones tal y como sucede con los poetas ingleses del Lake District. La naturaleza no sólo no es un espacio necesariamente peligroso o violento, sino que es considerado apriorísticamente como tal. La naturaleza humana en Hamsun y Lawrence es, antes de nada, interioridad que conforma los resortes interiores, su disposición y su mentalidad (tripas y cerebro inextricablemente unidos y confundidos). Tanto en Hamsun como en Lawrence, la naturaleza humana no es ni intelectualidad ni demonismo. Es, antes de nada, expresión de la realidad, realidad traducción inmediata de la tierra, Gaia; realidad en tanto que fuente de vida.

 

D H Lawrence

Frente a este manantial, la alienación moderna conlleva dos actitudes humanas opuestas: 1.º necesidad de la tierra, fuente de vitalidad, y 2.º zozobra en la alienación, causa de enfermedades y esclerosis. Es precisamente en esa bipolaridad donde cabe ubicar las dos grandes obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence: Bendición de la tierra, para el noruego, y El arcoiris del inglés.
En Bendición de la tierra de Hamsun, la naturaleza constituye el espacio el trabajo existencial donde el hombre opera con total independencia para alimentarse y perpetuarse. No se trata de una naturaleza idílica, como sucede en ciertos utopistas bucólicos, y además el trabajo no ha sido abolido. La naturaleza es inabarcable, conforma el destino, y es parte de la propia humanidad de tal forma que su pérdida comportaría deshumanización. El protagonista principal, el campesino Isak, es feo y desgarbado, es tosco y simple, pero inquebrantable, un ser limitado, pero no exento de voluntad. El espacio natural, la Wildnis, es ese ámbito que tarde o temprano ha de llevar la huella del hombre; no se trata del espacio o el reino del hombre convencional o, más exactamente, el acotado por los relojes, sino el del ritmo de las estaciones, con sus ciclos periódicos. En dicho espacio, en dicho tiempo, no existen interrogantes, se sobrevive para participar al socaire de un ritmo que nos desborda. Ese destino es duro. Incluso llega a ser muy duro. Pero a cambio ofrece independencia, autonomía, permite una relación directa con el trabajo. Otorga sentido, porque tiene sentido. En El arcoiris, de Lawrence, una familia vive de forma independiente de la tierra con el único beneficio de sus cosechas.

Hamsun y Lawrence, en estas dos novelas, nos legan la visión de un hombre unido al terruño (ein beheimateter Mensch), de un hombre anclado a un territorio limitado. El beheimateter Mensch ignora el saber libresco, no tiene necesidad de las prédicas de los medios informativos, su sabiduría práctica le es suficiente; gracias a ella, sus actos tienen sentido, incluso cuando fantasea o da rienda suelta a los sentimientos. Ese saber inmediato, además, le procura unidad con los otros seres.

Desde una óptica tal, la alienación, cuestión fundamental en el siglo XIX, adquiere otra perspectiva. Generalmente se aborda el problema de la alienación desde tres puntos de vista doctrinales:

1.º Según el punto de vista marxista e historicista, la alienación se localizaría únicamente en la esfera social, mientras que para Hamsun o Lawrence, se sitúa en la naturaleza interior del hombre, independientemente de su posición social o de su riqueza material.

2.º La alienación abordada a partir de la teología o la antropología.

3.º La alienación percibida como una anomalía social.

 

D H Lawrence

En Hegel, y más tarde en Marx, la alienación de los pueblos o de las masas es una etapa necesaria en el proceso de adecuación gradual entre la realidad y el absoluto. En Hamsun y Lawrence, la alienación es un concepto todavía más categórico; sus causas no residen en las estructuras socioeconómicas o políticas, sino en el distanciamiento con respecto a las raíces de la naturaleza (que no es, en consecuencia, una “buena” naturaleza). No desaparecerá la alienación con la simple instauración de un nuevo orden socioeconómico. En Hamsun y Lawrence, señala Doma, es el problema de la desconexión, de la cesura, el que tiene un rango esencial. La vida social ha devenido uniforme, desemboca en la uniformidad, la automatización, la funcionalización a ultranza, mientras que la naturaleza y el trabajo integrado en el ciclo de la vida no son uniformes y requieren en todo momento la movilización de energías vitales. Existe inmediatez, mientras que en la vida urbana, industrial y moderna todo está mediatizado, filtrado. Hamsun y Lawrence se rebelan contra dichos filtros.

Para Hamsun y, en menor medida, Lawrence las fuerzas interiores cuentan para la “naturaleza”. Con la llegada de la modernidad, los hombres están determinados por factores exteriores a ellos, como son los convencionalismos, la lucha política y la opinión pública, que ofrecen una suerte de ilusión por la libertad, cuando en realidad conforman el escenario ideal para todo tipo de manipulaciones. En un contexto tal, las comunidades acaba por desvertebrarse: cada individuo queda reducido a una esfera de actividad autónoma y en concurrencia con otros individuos. Todo ello acaba por derivar en debilidad, aislamiento y hostilidad de todos contra todos.

Los síntomas de esta debilidad son la pasión por las cosas superficiales, los vestidos refinados (Hamsun), signo de una fascinación detestable por lo externo; esto es, formas de dependencia, signos de vacío interior. El hombre quiebra por efecto de presiones exteriores. Indicios, al fin y a la postre, de la pérdida de vitalidad que conlleva la alienación.
En el marco de esta quiebra que supone la vida urbana, el hombre no encuentra estabilidad, pues la vida en las ciudades, en las metrópolis, es hostil a cualquier forma de estabilidad. El hombre alienado ya no puede retornar a su comunidad, a sus raíces familiares. Así Lawrence, con un lenguaje menos áspero pero acaso más incisivo, escribe: “He was the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama” (“Era la audiencia eterna, el coro, el espectador del drama; pero en su propia vida, no había drama alguno”); “He scarcely existed except through other people” (“Apenas existía, salvo en medio de otras personas”); “He had come to a stability of nullification” (“Había llegado a una estabilidad que lo había anulado”).

En Hamsun y Lawrence, el Ent-wurzelung y el Unbehaustheit, el desarraigo y la carencia de hogar, esa forma de vivir sin fuego, constituye la gran tragedia de la humanidad de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Para Hamsun el hogar es vital para el hombre. El hombre debe tener hogar. El hogar de su existencia. No se puede prescindir del hogar sin autoprovocarse una profunda mutilación. Mutilación de carácter psíquico, que conduce a la histeria, al nerviosismo, al desequilibro. Hamsun es, al fin y al cabo, un psicólogo. Y nos dice: la conciencia de sí es a menudo un síntoma de alienación. Schiller, en su ensayo Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, señalaba que la concordancia entre sentir y pensar era tangible, real e interior en el hombre natural, al contrario que en el hombre cultivado que es ideal y exterior (“La concordancia entre sensaciones y pensamiento existía antaño, pero en la actualidad sólo reside en el plano ideal. Esta concordancia no reside en el hombre, sino que existe exteriormente a él; se trata de una idea que debe ser realizada, no un hecho de su vida”).

Schiller aboga por una Überwindung (superación) de dicha quiebra a través de una movilización total del individuo. El romanticismo, por su parte, considerará la reconciliación entre Ser (Sein) y conciencia (Bewußtsein) como la forma de combatir el reduccionismo que trata de arrinconar la conciencia bajo los corsés de entendimiento racional. El romanticismo valorará, e incluso sobrevalorará, al “otro” con relación a la razón (das Andere der Vernunft): percepción sensual, instinto, intuición, experiencia mística, infancia, sueño, vida bucólica. Wordsworth, romántico inglés, representante “rosa” de dicha voluntad de reconciliación entre Ser y conciencia, defenderá la presencia de “un corazón que observe y apruebe”. Dostoievski no compartirá dicha visión “rosa” y desarrollará una concepción “negra”, donde el intelecto es siempre causa de mal, y el “poseso” un ser que tenderá a matar o a suicidarse. En el plano filosófico, tanto Klages como Lessing retomarán por su cuenta esta visión “negra” del intelecto, profundizando, no obstante, en la veta del romanticismo naturalista: para Klages, el espíritu es enemigo del alma; para Lessing, el espíritu es la contrapartida de la vida, que surge de la necesidad (“Geist ist das notgeborene Gegenspiel des Lebens”).

Lawrence, fiel en cierto sentido a la tradición romántica inglesa de Wordsworth, cree en una nueva adecuación del Ser y la conciencia. Hamsun, más pesimista, más dostoievskiano (de ahí su acogida en Rusia y su influencia en los autores llamados ruralistas, como Vasili Belov y Valentín Rasputín), nunca dejará de pensar que desde que hay conciencia, hay alienación. Desde que el hombre comienza a reflexionar sobre sí mismo, se desliga de la continuidad que confiere la naturaleza y a la cual debiera estar siempre sujeto. En los ensayos de Hamsun, encontramos reflexiones sobre la modernidad literaria. La vida moderna, ha escrito, influye, transforma, lleva al hombre a arrancarlo de su destino, a apartarlo de su punto de llegada, de sus instintos, más allá del bien y del mal. La evolución literaria del siglo XIX muestra una fiebre, un desequilibrio, un nerviosismo, una complicación extrema de la psicología humana. “El nerviosismo general (ambiente) se ha adueñado de nuestro ser fundamental y se ha fijado en nuestra vida sentimental”. El escritor se nos muestra así, al estilo de un Zola, como un “médico social” encargado de diagnosticar los males sociales con objeto de erradicar el mal. El escritor, el intelectual, se embarca en una tarea misionera que trata de llegar a una “corrección política”.

 

Nietzsche con el uniforme de artillero prusiano, 1868

Frente a esta visión intelectual del escritor, el reproche de Hamsun señala la imposibilidad de definir objetivamente la realidad humana, pues un “hombre objetivo” es, en sí mismo, una monstruosidad (ein Unding), un ser construido como si de un mecano se tratase. No podemos reducir al hombre a un compendio de características, pues el hombre es evolución, ambigüedad. El mismo criterio encontramos en Lawrence: “Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part” (“Bien, yo niego absoluta y francamente ser un alma, o un cuerpo, o un espíritu, o una inteligencia, o un cerebro, o un sistema nervioso, o un conjunto de glándulas, o cualquier otra parte de mí mismo. El todo es más grande que las partes”). Hamsun y Lawrence ilustran en sus obras la imposibilidad de teorizar o absolutizar una visión diáfana del hombre. El hombre no puede ser vehículo de ideas preconcebidas. Hamsun y Lawrence confirman que los progresos en la conciencia de uno mismo no conllevan procesos de emancipación espiritual, sino pérdidas, despilfarro de la vitalidad, del tono vital. En sus novelas, son las figuras firmes (esto es, las que están arraigadas a la tierra) las que logran mantenerse, las que triunfan más allá de los golpes de suerte o las circunstancias desgraciadas.

No se trata, en absoluto, repetimos, de vidas bucólicas o idílicas. Los protagonistas de las novelas de Hamsun y Lawrence son penetrados o atraídos por la modernidad, los cuales, pese a su irreductible complejidad, pueden sucumbir, sufren, padecen un proceso de alienación, pero también pueden triunfar. Y es precisamente aquí donde intervienen la ironía de Hamsun o la idea del “Fénix” de Lawrence. La ironía de Hamsun taladra los ideales abstractos de las ideologías modernas. En Lawrence, la recurrente idea del “Fénix” supone una cierta dosis de esperanza: habrá resurrección. Es la idea de Ave Fénix, que renace de sus propias cenizas.

El paganismo de Hamsun y Lawrence

Si dicha voluntad de retorno a una ontología natural es fruto de un rechazo del intelectualismo racionalista, ello implica al mismo tiempo una contestación de calado al mensaje cristiano.

En Hamsun, se ve con claridad el rechazo del puritanismo familiar (concretado en la figura de su tío Han Olsen) y el rechazo al culto protestante por los libros sagrados; esto es, el rechazo explícito de un sistema de pensamiento religioso que prima el saber libresco frente a la experiencia existencial (particularmente la del campesino autosuficiente, el Odalsbond de los campos noruegos). El anticristianismo de Hamsun es, fundamentalmente, un acristianismo: no se plantea dudas religiosas a lo Kierkegaard. Para Hamsun, el moralismo del protestantismo de la era victoriana (de la era oscariana, diríamos para Escandinavia) es simple y llanamente pérdida de vitalidad. Hamsun no apuesta por experiencia mística alguna.

Lawrence, por su parte, percibe la ruptura de toda relación con los misterios cósmicos. El cristianismo vendría a reforzar dicha ruptura, impediría su cura, imposibilitaría su cicatrización. En este sentido, la religiosidad europea aún conservaría un poso de dicho culto al misterio cósmico: el año litúrgico, el ciclo litúrgico (Pascua, Pentecostés, Fuego de San Juan, Todos los Santos, Navidad, Fiesta de los Reyes Magos). Pero incluso éste ha sido aherrojado como consecuencia de un proceso de desencantamiento y desacralización, cuyo comienzo arranca en el momento mismo de la llegada de la Iglesia cristiana primitiva y que se reforzará con los puritanismos y los jansenismos segregados por la Reforma. Los primeros cristianos se plantearon como objetivo apartar al hombre de sus ciclos cósmicos. La Iglesia medieval, por el contrario, quiso adecuarse, pero las Iglesias protestantes y conciliares posteriores han expresado con claridad su voluntad de regresar al anticosmicismo del cristianismo primitivo. En este sentido, Lawrence escribe: “But now, after almost three thousand years, now that we are almost abstracted entirely from the rhythmic life of the seasons, birth and death and fruition, now we realize that such abstraction is neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity. It brings null inertia” (“Pero hoy, después de tres mil años, después que estamos casi completamente abstraídos de la vida rítmica de las estaciones, del nacimiento, de la muerte y de la fecundidad, comprendemos al fin que tal abstracción no es ni una bendición ni una liberación, sino pura nada. No nos aporta otra cosa que inercia”). Esta ruptura es consustancial al cristianismo de las civilizaciones urbanas, donde no hay apertura alguna hacia el cosmos. Cristo no es un Cristo cósmico, sino un Cristo rebajado al papel de asistente social. Mircea Eliade, por su parte, se ha referido a un “hombre cósmico”, abierto a la inmensidad del cosmos, pilar de todas las grandes religiones. En la perspectiva de Eliade, lo sagrado es lo real, el poder, la fuente de vida y de la fertilidad. Eliade nos ha dejado escrito: “El deseo del hombre religioso de vivir una vida en el ámbito de lo sagrado es el deseo de vivir en la realidad objetiva”.

Knut Hamsun, 1927

La lección ideológica y política de Hamsun y Lawrence

En el plano ideológico y político, en el plano de la Weltanschauung, las obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence han tenido un impacto bastante considerable. Hamsun ha sido leído por todos, más allá de la polaridad comunismo/fascismo. Lawrence ha sido etiquetado como “fascista” a título póstumo, entre otros por Bertrand Russell que llegó incluso a referirses a su “madness”: “Lawrence was a suitable exponent of the Nazi cult of insanity” (“Lawrence fue un exponente típico del culto nazi a la locura”). Frase tan lapidaria como simplista. Las obras de Hamsun y de Lawrence, sgún Akos Doma, se inscriben en un cuádruple contexto: el de la filosofía de la vida, el de los avatares del individualismo, el de la tradición filosófica vitalista, y el del antiutopismo y el irracionalismo.

1.º La filosofía de la vida (Lebensphilosophie) es un concepto de lucha, que opone la “vivacidad de la vida real” a la rigidez de los convencionalismos, a los fuegos de artificio inventados por la civilización urbana para tratar de orientar la vida hacia un mundo desencantado. La filosofía de la vida se manifiesta bajo múltiples rostos en el contexto del pensamiento europeo y toma realmente cuerpo a partir de la reflexiones de Nietzsche sobre la Leiblichkeit (corporeidad).

2.º El individualismo. La antropología hamsuniana postula la absoluta unidad de cada individuo, de cada persona, pero rechaza el aislamiento de ese individuo o persona de todo contexto comunitario, familiar o carnal: sitúa a la persona de una manera interactiva, en un lugar preciso. La ausencia de introspección especulativa, de conciencia y de intelectualismo abstracto hacen incompatible el individualismo hamsuniano con la antropología segregada por el Iluminismo. Para Hamsun, sin embargo, no se combate el individualismo iluminista sermoneando sobre un colectivismo de contornos ideológicos. El renacimiento del hombre auténtico pasa por una reactivación de los resortes más profundos de su alma y de su cuerpo. La suma cuantitativa y mecánica es una insuficiencia calamitosa. En consecuencia, la acusación de “fascismo” hacia Lawrence y Hamsun no se sostiene en pie.

3.º El vitalismo tiene en cuenta todos los acontecimientos de la vida y excluye cualquier jerarquización de base racial, social, etc. Las oposiciones propias del vitalismo son: afirmación de la vida / negación de la vida; sano / enfermo; orgánico / mecánico. De ahí, que no se pueda reconducirlas a categorías sociales, a categorías políticas convencionales, etc. La vida es una categoría fundamental apolítica, pues todos los hombres sin distinción están sometidos a ella.

4.º El “irracionalismo” reprochado a Hamsun y Lawrence, igual que su antiutopismo, tienen su base en una revuelta contra la “viabilidad” (feasibility; Machbarkeit), contra la idea de perfectibilidad infinita (que encontramos también bajo una forma “orgánica” en los románticos ingleses de la primera generación). La idea de viabilidad choca directamente con la esencia biológica de la naturaleza. De hecho, la idea de viabilidad es la esencia del nihilismo, como ha apuntado el filósofo italiano Emanuele Severino. Para Severino, la viabilidad deriva de una voluntad de completar el mundo aprehendiéndolo como un devenir (pero no como un devenir orgánico incontrolable). Una vez el proceso de “acabamiento” ha concluido, el devenir detiene bruscamente su curso. Una estabilidad general se impone en la Tierra y esta estabilidad forzada es descrita como un “bien absoluto”. Desde la literatura, Hamsun y Lawrence, han precedido así a filósofos contemporáneos como el citado Emanuele Severino, Robert Spaemann (con su crítica del funcionalismo), Ernst Behler (con su crítica de la “perfectibilidad infinita”) o Peter Koslowski. Estos filósofos, fuera de Alemania o Italia, son muy poco conocidos por el gran público. Su crítica a fondo de los fundamentos de las ideologías dominantes, provoca inevitablemente el rechazo de la solapada inquisición que ejerce su dominio en París.

Nietzsche, Hamsun y Lawrence, los filósofos vitalistas o, si se prefiere, “antiviabilistas”, al insistir sobre el carácter ontológico de la biología humana, se opusieron a la idea occidental y nihilista de la viabilidad absoluta de cualquier cosa; esto es, de la inexistencia ontológica de todas las cosas, de cualquier realidad. Buen número de ellos —Hamsun y Lawrence incluidos— nos llaman la atención sobre el presente eterno de nuestros cuerpos, sobre nuestra propia corporeidad (Leiblichkeit), pues nosotros no podemos conformar nuestros cuerpos, en contraposición a esas voces que nos quieren convencer de las bondades de la ciencia-ficción.

La viabilidad es, pues, el “hybris” que ha llegado a su techo y que conduce a la fiebre, la vacuidad, la ligereza, el solipsismo y el aislamiento. De Heidegger a Severino, la filosofía europea se ha ocupado sobre la catástrofe que ha supuesto la desacralización del Ser y el desencantamiento del mundo. Si los resortes profundos y misteriosos de la Tierra o del hombre son considerados como imperfecciones indignas del interés del teólogo o del filósofo, si todo aquello que ha sido pensado de manera abstracta o fabricado más allá de los resortes (ontológicos) se encuentra sobrevalorado, entonces, efectivamente, no puede extrañarnos que el mundo pierda toda sacralidad, todo valor. Hamsun y Lawrence han sido los escritores que nos han hecho vivir con intensidad dicha constante, por encima incluso de algunos filósofos que también han deplorado la falsa ruta emprendida por el pensamiento occidental desde hace siglos. Heidegger y Severino en el marco de la filosofía, Hamsun y Lawrence en el de la creación literaria, han tratado de restituir la sacralidad en el mundo y revalorizar las fuerzas que se esconden en el interior del hombre: desde ese punto de vista, estamos ante pensadores ecológicos en la más profunda acepción del término. El oikos nos abre las puertas de lo sagrado, de las fuerzas misteriosas e incontrolables, sin fatalismos y sin falsa humildad. Hamsun y Lawrence, en definitiva, anunciaron la dimensión geofilosófica del pensamiento que nos ha ocupado durante toda esta universidad de verano. Una aproximación sucinta a sus obras se hacía absolutamente necesaria en el temario de 1996.

________________

* Comentario al libro de Akos Doma, Die andere Moderne. Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence und die lebensphilosophische Strömung des literarischen Modernismus (Bouvier, Bonn, 1995), leído como conferencia en Lombardía, en julio de 1996. Traducción de Juan C. García Morcillo.

[Tomo el artículo del archivo de su fuente primera, la asociación Sinergias Europeas, que editaba el boletín InfoEuropa. Ya no cabalgan.]

Les plus atroces injustices...

Les plus atroces injustices...

Ex: http://zentropa.splinder.com/

"Aucun adulte ne peut lire Dickens sans percevoir ses limites, mais elles ne remettent pas en cause cette générosité d'esprit innée qui joue en quelque sorte le rôle d'une ancre et empêche presque toujours Dickens de partir à la dérive. C'est probablement là le secret de sa popularité. Cette espèce d'heureux antinomianisme que l'on trouve chez Dickens est l'un des traits caractéristiques de la culture populaire occidentale. Il est présent dans les contes et chansons humoristiques, dans les figures mythiques comme Mickey Mouse ou Popeye, dans l'histoire du socialisme ouvrier, dans les protestations populaires contre l'impérialisme, dans l'élan qui pousse un jury à accorder des indemnités exorbitantes quand la voiture d'un riche écrase un pauvre. C'est le sentiment qu'il faut toujours être du côté de l'opprimé, prendre le parti du faible contre le fort. En un sens, c'est un sentiment qui est passé de mode depuis une cinquantaine d'années.
L'homme de la rue vit toujours dans l'univers psychologique de Dickens, mais la plupart des intellectuels, pour ne pas dire tous, se sont ralliés à une forme de totalitarisme ou à une autre. D'une point de vue marxiste ou fasciste, la quasi-totalité des valeurs défendues par Dickens peuvent être assimilées à la "morale bourgeoise" et honnies à ce titre. Mais pour ce qui est des conceptions morales, il n'y a rien de plus "bourgeois" que la classe ouvrière anglaise.

Les gens ordinaires, dans les pays occidentaux, n'ont pas encore accepté l'univers mental du "réalisme" et de la politique de la Force. Il se peut que cela se produise un jour ou l'autre, auquel cas Dickens sera aussi désuet que le cheval de fiacre. Mais s'il a été populaire en son temps, et s'il l'est encore, c'est principalement parce qu'il a su exprimer sous une forme comique, schématique et par là même mémorable, l'honnêteté innée de l'homme ordinaire. Et il est important que sous ce rapport des gens de toutes sortes puissent être considérés comme "ordinaires". Dans un pays tel que l'Angleterre, il existe, par delà la division des classes, une certaine unité de culture. Tout au long de l'ère chrétienne, et plus nettement encore après la Révolution française, le monde occidental a été hanté par les idées de liberté et d'égalité. Ce ne sont que des idées, mais elles ont pénétré toutes les couches de la société. On voit partout subsister les plus atroces injustices, cruautés, mensonges, snobismes, mais il est peu de gens qui puissent contempler tout cela aussi froidement qu'un propriétaire d'esclaves romain, par exemple. Le millionnaire lui-même éprouve un vague sentiment de culpabilité, comme un chien dévorant le gigot qu'il a dérobé. La quasi-totalité des gens, quelle que soit leur conduite réelle, réagit passionnellement à l'idée de la fraternité humaine. Dickens a énoncé un code auquel on accordait et on continue à accorder foi, même si on le transgresse. S'il en était autrement, on comprendrait mal comment il a pu à la fois être lu par des ouvriers (chose qui n'est arrivée à aucun autre romancier de son envergure), et être enterré à Westminster Abbey."

George Orwell, Charles Dickens (1939) in Dans le ventre de la baleine et autres essais, Editions Ivrea/Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Paris, 2005, pp. 124-125.

1984, 1984,5,1985 ou d'Orwell à Burgess

Archives de SYNERGIES EUROPEENNES - 1985

1984... 1984 ^1/2... 1985

ou d'Orwell à Burgess

 

1984 fut incontestablement l'année Orwell. Une abondante littérature et même un film remirent à l'honneur l'œuvre immortelle de cet ancien combattant de la Guerre d'Espagne que fut Orwell. Beaucoup de critiques s'obstinent à voir, dans son chef-d'œuvre, 1984, une description un peu exagérée de notre monde actuel. Ils affirment que les éléments décrits par Orwell et non encore advenus dans notre monde quotidien, seront réalité dans un avenir plus ou moins rapproché. D'autres pensent que le monde de 1984 ne ressemble qu'à certaines facettes de la réalité soviétique et se félicitent, en guise de conclusion, de vivre dans l'hémisphère libre, lisez occidental. La critique d'un autre génie littéraire, compatriote d'Orwell, mérite une attention toute particulière. Car cette critique transcende nettement les bavardages des littérateurs médiatiques et des sociologues abscons. Cet écrivain, qui a tenté une critique nouvelle d'Orwell, n'est autre que le très célèbre Anthony Burgess, créateur de A Clockwork Orange (Orange mécanique). Il a écrit, à l'occasion de l'année Orwell, un ouvrage resté trop ignoré des médias et qui s'intitule significativement 1985.

 

Globalement, Burgess estime que la vision que nous transmet Orwell est exagérée et improbable. Tout d'abord, écrit Burgess dans la première partie de son 1985, les éléments essentiels de 1984 sont trop liés à une époque historique précise pour avoir réelle valeur prophétique. « La Grande-Bretagne décrite par Orwell, avec ses omniprésentes odeurs de choux cuits, ses rations de viande et sa pénurie de cigarettes n'est pour Burgess qu'une image trop reconnaissable de l'ère d'austérité et de socialisme qui suivit les années de guerre (celle de 39-45, ndlr) », écrit Marc Paillot (The Dystopian Novels of Anthony Burgess, mémoire de licence, Bruxelles, 1984).

 

En effet, il semblerait que l'Ingsoc orwellien (abréviation pour English Socialism, idéologie officielle dans le monde de 1984 [expression de la pensée unique de Big Brother]) ne soit qu'une caricature in absurdo du régime socialiste (travailliste) de Mr. Attlee. Mais, plutôt que tyrannique, le régime de Mr. Attlee fut paternaliste (Cf. Paillot, op. cit.). Dans sa critique de 1984, Burgess prétend qu'Orwell a exprimé en fait la rancune ou du moins les sentiments ambigus de sa génération à l'égard de la politique intérieure anglaise de 1948 ("84" étant, rappelons-le, l'inverse de "48").

 

Ensuite, dit Burgess, 1984 nous présente un monde qui repose sur une seule motivation : la haine. Le fonctionnaire O'Brian y explique à ses victimes que le « grand et terrible but du Parti est un monde de peur et de trahison, de torture (...), un monde d'où toute notion de merci sera progressivement évacuée ». Selon Burgess, une telle société ne peut survivre et certainement pas à l'échelle mondiale. Aucun régime ne peut s'alimenter impunément à la seule source de la haine et de la trahison. Marc Paillot insiste sur ce point avec pertinence : « Le régime appelé Ingsoc (English Socialism ?) dont le but n'est même plus le pouvoir mais d'infliger la souffrance ne peut être, même dans le cas de 1984, qu'une aberration temporaire. Ing­soc n'est dans ce sens, non une représenta­tion de la Puissance, mais, n'en représente qu'une métaphore » (op.cit.).

 

Burgess critique également la division du monde en trois blocs ou zones de puissance qui apparaît dans le 1984 d'Orwell. Il déclare cette vision irréaliste. Pour les lecteurs de Vouloir et Orientations habitués à l'argumentation géopolitique, bornons-nous à constater, ici, que George Orwell imaginait, à l'aube des années 50, qu'une superpuissance eurasiatique (le bloc imaginé par Haushofer, Niekisch et les si­gnataires du Pacte germano-soviétique d'août 1939) allait se constituer pour défier le Nouveau Monde et l'Océania thalassocrati­que, c'est-à-dire les États-Unis avec leur arrière-cour sud-américaine et le Common­wealth.

 

Mais, il nous apparaît légitime de poser à Burgess quelques questions critiques quand il nous expose son scepticisme en analysant le rôle joué par les mass-media dans la contre-­utopie orwellienne. Selon Orwell, les mass­media serviraient le grand dessein des dictatures réelles ou potentielles. Pourtant, dit Burgess, au lieu de voir les traits sérieux et sévères de Big Brother sur nos petits écrans, nous sommes contraints de subir d'interminables successions de spots publicitaires (M.Paillot, op.cit.). Bien qu'il admette que la société de consommation soit une forme moderne de tyrannie - nous dirions plutôt qu'il s'agit d'un totalitarisme doux et tiède - Marc Paillot reprend la critique de Burgess : Orwell s'est, d'après eux, complètement trompé dans ce domaine.

 

Que faut-il en penser ? Lorsqu'on nous assène sans cesse au petit écran les images d'un Reagan qui, "Big Smile" hollywoodien en prime, nous impose les vues de l'élite puritaine et droitière américaine ; lorsqu'on nous assène sans cesse les sourires mielleux d'un Karol Woytila qui, célibataire par la force des choses, prétend enseigner à ses ouailles comment vivre en mariage ; lorsqu'on nous assène sans cesse des feuilletons débiles et des spots publicitaires de même acabit, n'avons-nous pas affaire à autant de masques différents du Big Brother ? Diversité sans doute plus dangereuse que la monotonie que subissent les Est-Européens, saturés des photos retouchées de Staline, Brejnev, Andropov ou Gorbatchev.

 

« Le monde moderne exige notre argent et non point notre âme », écrit Paillot. Entendons par là que le consumérisme et les valeurs marchandes, souverains "-ismes" d’aujourd’hui, ne sollicitent pas particulièrement ce qu'il y a de meilleur en l'homme. La société de consommation enterre l'âme des peuples sous l'argent et les gadgets. Ces funérailles, accompagnées des rythmes saccadés des hit-parades truqués et des bénédictions reagano-papales, n'ont pas lieu à Disneyland, mais bien EN chacun d'entre nous.

 

Comme l'indique Paillot dans sa remarquable étude des romans dystopiques de Burgess, en tant qu'individus, nous sommes impuissants face à la marée consumériste comme face aux régimes carcéraux de l'Est. La seule possibilité de combattre avec succès le marxisme-léninisme dégénéré en apparatchnikisme gérontocratique et l'angélisme rose-­bonbon du libéralisme hollywoodien, c'est de recourir aux consciences populaires euro­péennes, vieilles de plusieurs millénaires. Cette renaissance-là nous est suggérée, notamment, par notre ami Guillaume Faye. Qui a su, de manière plus poignante que lui, réclamer une telle révolution ?

 

1984... Et après ? Après, il y a 1984 1/2. Tel aurait dû être le titre du film Brazil, une production d'un membre du désopilant groupe Monty Python (Brian's Life, The Holy Grail, etc...). Ce film demeure dans la ligne de The Meaning of Life, création du même groupe ; il est une critique particulièrement féroce à l'adresse de la société occidentale.

 

Au premier abord, Brazil nous apparaît défaitiste. En réalité, ce film est une sonnette d'alarme. En effet, Brazil nous montre, non sans humour et par le biais des péripéties étranges que vit le héros central, que l'ennemi à combattre immédiatement est à l'intérieur de nous-mêmes. Car c'est là qu'agit l'Hydre des solutions faciles, de la servitude, de la banalité et de l'auto-­destruction. Dans ce film, les forces qu'il s'agit de réanimer et d'opposer à l'engloutissement lent mais certain dans le bain tiède que nous préparent prédicateurs (hypocrites) des droits de l'homme et multinationales, ne sont autres que l'imagination et la puissance créatrice. Rappelant par là le chef-d’œuvre de Michael Ende, Unendliche Geschichten, l'auteur du film semble vouloir démontrer que la régénération nécessaire de l'homme moderne doit passer par là, et que ces forces ne sont pas encore anéanties. Loin de là. Tant que l'amour et le Reinmenschliches (le pur-humain) existeront, il restera une lueur d'espoir dans ce monde sinistre que nous présente finalement Brazil. L'œuvre de Burgess s'inscrirait, selon Paillot, dans la même ligne, tandis que chez Orwell, toute notion d'amour ferait défaut.

 

Le film ne connaît pas de happy end : sans doute pour nous montrer à quel point nous avons le couteau sur la gorge. Tous les critiques de cinéma, trop spécialistes peut-­être, sont d'accord pour définir le per­sonnage principal comme le type même du anti-héros moderne. Je crois au contraire que ce personnage mérite le titre de héros à part entière, comme bon nombre de héros légendaires. Ne s'agit-il pas d'un reiner Tor (un fou pur, à la Parzifal), déplace dans un scénario futuriste ? Tous ses actes, ses mouvements et ses paroles s'inscrivent dans l'innocence d'une nouvelle jeunesse non préparée par et pour cette société de consommation hypocrite où se déroule Brazil. Il ne sera pourtant pas couronné Roi de la Table Ronde ou Maître du Graal renouvelé : per son sacrifice qui marque la fin du film, il espère éveiller notre conscience humaine. La mélodie qui continue après la fin du film n'est-elle pas la torche enflammée d'une force créatrice et d'une imagination ressuscitées, torche que le héros de l'écran remet à chaque spectateur ?

 

1984 1/2... Et après ? Après : 1985. Dans 1985, la contre-utopie d'Anthony Bur­gess, en quelque sorte sa version à lui de 1984, nous est décrite une Angleterre chaotique et entièrement dirigée par un syndicalisme tout-puissant. En cela, Burgess s'est sans doute basé sur la réelle puissance des syndicats britanniques (les trade unions) dont témoignaient, il y a peu, les grèves des mineurs.

 

Dans l'œuvre d'Orwell, les dirigeants transforment et falsifient sans cesse l'Histoire, falsifications qui passent ensuite par le canal des médias. Les chefs de 1985, eux, mettent tout en œuvre pour évacuer la conscience historique et les fondements culturels de la société pour mieux asservir la population, en grande partie d'origine arabe. Ici également, Burgess emprunte des éléments qui marquent la réalité anglaise actuelle, où les capitaux arabes [allusion aux « rois du pétrole »] jouent un rôle prépondérant. Les moyens mis en œuvre pour liquider toute conscience historique et culturelle dans les cerveaux du peuple sont d'ordre pédagogique, idéologique et linguistique.

 

Le niveau de l'enseignement est progressivement diminué. « Il est effectivement plus facile d'assujettir une population de semi­-illettrés que d'intellectuels ou même de gens moyennement cultives », écrit Marc Paillot. Heureusement que pareille chose ne puisse se passer que dans l'imagination de quelques écrivains,..

 

Ensuite, l'histoire a été réduite à une étude du syndicalisme avec une double conséquence : primo, c'est un excellent moyen de propa­gande ("Regarde comme ils t'exploitaient avant qu'il n'existe des syndicats") et, se­cundo, cela empêchera, même à très court terme, la population d'imaginer que l'histoire fut peut-être autre chose qu'une longue et pénible évolution aboutissant tout naturellement à une forme de syndicalisme holiste (holistic syndicalism) ainsi que le suggère Marc Paillot.

 

Quant aux procédés linguistiques destinés à accélérer la soumission du peuple, il s'agit de transformations, de grossières simplifications syntaxiques. Cette nouvelle langue, le Worker's English n'est pas qu'un cauchemar dont il ne reste plus une trace à l'aube : sans vouloir entrer dans la problématique posée par l'invasion de mots et d'expressions anglo-saxonnes dans les autres langues, il suffit de citer un slogan publicitaire d'une chaîne belge de fast-food, au lecteur d'en juger : « Toi goûter nouveau shake ». Au seuil du XXIe siècle, l'homo occidentalis retourne dans les arbres.

 

Les excès de la "démocratisation", le nivellement par le bas généralisé, constituent les pires fléaux qui frappent le monde d’aujour­d'hui, remarque Paillot. Et a poursuit : « Nous avons déjà bien trop sacrifié sur l'autel de l'égalitarisme ».

 

C'est un exercice intellectuel assez vain de chercher ce qui est irréaliste dans les contre-utopies d'Orwell et de Burgess. Il est encore plus vain de les critiquer sous prétexte que tel ou tel détail ne s'est jamais concrétisé. L'important, c'est que cha­cune de ces œuvres réveille en nous l'instinct de survie propre à tous les êtres vivants. Avec cet instinct seul, nous pour­rons retrouver la conscience nécessaire qui nous aidera à briser les chaînes des totalitarismes de toutes natures. Avec une nouvelle conscience historique, comme avec notre âme, renaîtra, tel le phénix de ses cendres, la liberté sacrée et fondamentalement aristocratique dont ont besoin les peuples européens.

 

► Ralf  VAN DEN HAUTE, Vouloir n°21-22, sept. 1985.

 

Bibliographie complémentaire :

 

Anthony Burgess, 1985, Hutchinson, Lon­don, 1978. Edition de poche anglaise : Arrow Books, 1980/83.

Bernard Crick, Georges Orwell, une vie, Balland, Paris, 1982. Une des plus célèbres biographies d'Orwell. Une édition de poche est également disponible.

Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Night-mare : HG Wells and the Anti-Utopians, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967. Un des meilleurs ouvrages en anglais sur la littérature "dystopique".

 

Saint Chesterton, riez pour nous !

Dieu : la preuve par l’Absurde

Ex: http://www.causeur.fr

Puisque la mode est aux béatifications, j’en ai une bien bonne à vous raconter ! En plus, celle-là n’a guère été médiatisée, et pour cause : Gilbert K. Chesterton n’a pas été pape de 1939 à 1945. Primo, la place était prise ; deuxio les papes anglais, ça se fait plutôt rare ces deux mille dernières années ; et puis de toute façon, l’intéressé était mort depuis trois ans.
Accessoirement, la cause de béatification de Gilbert n’en est qu’à ses tout débuts. C’est seulement l’été passé que le Chesterton Institute a eu l’idée de l’introduire auprès du Vatican, à l’issue d’un colloque judicieusement intitulé  “The Holiness of Gilbert K. Chesterton“.
La nouvelle fut annoncée au monde ébahi le 14 juillet dernier par Paolo Giulisano, auteur de la première biographie en italien de mon écrivain ultra-mancien préféré¹.

Il y raconte comment Pie XI avait réagi à l’annonce du décès de Chesterton (par la plume de son secrétaire d’Etat Eugenio Pacelli, encore lui !) Bref le pape Ratti déplorait, dans son message de condoléances, la perte de ce “fils fervent de la Sainte Eglise, brillant défenseur des bienfaits de la foi catholique.”

C’était seulement la deuxième fois dans l’Histoire qu’un pontife décernait ce titre, jadis prestigieux, de “défenseur de la foi” à un Anglais. Et encore, rappelle malicieusement Giulisano, la première fois ce ne fut pas un succès : ça concernait Henry VIII, peu avant qu’il n’invente sa propre Eglise pour des raisons de convenance personnelle².

Le chemin de Chesterton fut exactement inverse : élevé dans le protestantisme pur porc, marié à une “high anglican“, il n’a cessé de se rapprocher du catholicisme jusqu’à s’y convertir.
Dès ses jeunes années de journaliste, Gilbert s’exerça à dézinguer tour à tour les penseurs organiques de la société anglicano-victorienne : Kipling, Wells, G.-B. Shaw et leur “monde rapetissé”.
En 1901, il publie ses chroniques dans un recueil aimablement intitulé Hérétiques. Pourtant, il ne sortira lui-même officiellement de cette hérésie dominante, en se faisant baptiser, qu’à 40 ans passés… Le temps sans doute de peser la gravité d’une telle apostasie, et surtout de ménager son épouse – qui le suivra un an plus tard dans cette conversion. Happy end !

Dans l’intervalle, il avait quand même publié Orthodoxie, son Génie du christianisme à lui, en moins chiant quand même. Ce Credo iconoclaste, si l’on ose dire, fut sa réponse à une question mille fois entendue, genre : “C’est bien beau de tout critiquer, mais tu proposes quoi, petit con ?” (Gilbert avait 27 ans à la parution d’Hérétiques.) Une réponse en forme de pamphlet prophétique et drôle qui à coup sûr, un siècle plus tard, a moins vieilli que l’avant-dernier Onfray.
Je ne saurais trop recommander la lecture de ce chef-d’œuvre d’humour et d’amour – y compris à ceux d’entre vous qui n’ont “ni Dieu ni Diable”, comme disait ma grand-mère³. Après tout, les amateurs de films de vampires ne croient pas tous à l’existence de ces fantômes suceurs de sang…

Je reviendrai volontiers, à l’occasion, sur l’apologétique chestertonienne, pour peu qu’Elisabeth Lévy m’en prie… Mais pour aborder le bonhomme, dont toute l’œuvre n’a d’autre but que de mettre l’esprit au service de l’Esprit, il semble plus raisonnable de commencer par le “e” minuscule. Surtout sur un site comme Causeur – laïc et gratuit, faute hélas d’être obligatoire.

Journaliste, essayiste et romancier, “confesseur de la Foi” et auteur de polars, Chesterton fut d’abord, dans toutes ces entreprises, un incomparable théoricien mais aussi praticien du Rire (contrairement à l’ami Bergson, qui rit quand il se brûle⁴).
Ainsi, dans Le Défenseur⁵, publié la même année qu’Hérétiques, consacre-t-il un chapitre à la “Défense du nonsense”. Est-ce à dire que sa foi relève elle-même du nonsense ?

La réponse est oui à toutes les questions ! Ce punk, figurez-vous, n’hésite pas à justifier un paradoxe par un jeu de mots. Le fou, le vrai, nous dit-il, ce n’est pas comme dans le dico l’homme qui a perdu la raison ; c’est “celui qui a tout perdu sauf la raison”.
Le nonsense au sens de l’oncle Gilbert, c’est le contraire de la folie : une des façons les plus sensées, pour nous autres pauvres créatures – peut-être même pas créées ! – d’assumer notre condition. Et d’abord notre incapacité naturelle à “comprendre” l’Univers qui nous inclut. Il ferait beau voir, n’est ce pas, qu’un contenu explique son contenant !
Mais Chesterton ne plaisante pas avec le nonsense. N’allez pas, par exemple, lui parler de Lewis Carroll ! Son Alice au Pays des Merveilles relève tout juste de l’ ”exercice mathématique”. Loin d’abjurer la foi en la déesse Raison, il en intègre tous les principes. Ses fantaisies millimétrées ne sont pas un moyen d’évasion : juste la cour de la prison !

Le vrai nonsense selon G.K., il faut aller le chercher chez Edward Lear (1812-1888), passé d’extrême justesse à la postérité grâce à ses Nonsense poems⁶. Pourtant, au temps de Chesterton déjà, ce ouf malade était bien démodé, quand “Alice” avait commencé de s’imposer comme la Bible du nonsense.
Eh bien, Gilbert s’en fout : la différence irréductible, explique-t-il, c’est que les limericks de Lear ne riment littéralement à rien – même si leur versification, elle, a la rigueur métronomique d’une nursery rhyme. Et si l’ensemble donne une idée de l’Absolu, c’est qu’il n’est relatif à rien de particulier : ouvert comme un Oulipo en plein air.

Bien sûr la lettre en est inaccessible, et plus encore au lecteur non anglophone. Reste l’esprit, qui n’en est que plus libre.
Un exemple ? Mais bien volontiers : à la demande générale, laissez-moi “traduire” les premiers vers de Cold are the crabs, un des plus beaux poèmes du roi Lear ⁷. Ça m’a pris plus d’une heure pour un quatrain, alors doucement les basses ! De toute façon, je ne risque rien : personne n’a jamais pu faire le job convenablement, même Google !

Faute de “sens” conventionnel, que traduire exactement ? Rien. A sa façon, le learisme est un darwinisme : adapt or die ! Voici donc mon adaptation de Cold are the crabs⁸ (on considérera comme muets, par licence poétique, les “e” qui figurent entre parenthèses) :
“Froids sont les crab(e)s qui rampent sur nos monts,
Et plus froids les concombr(e)s qui poussent tout au fond ;
Mais plus froides encor(e) les menteries cyniques
Qui emballent nos trist(e)s pilules philosophiques.”

Comment ça, je ne suis pas fidèle au texte ? Mais qui êtes-vous pour parler de contre-sens dans l’adaptation d’un nonsense ? Bien sûr, là où j’écris “menteries cyniques”, Google préfère traduire littéralement “côtelettes d’airain”. Du coup ça vous prend une consonance surréaliste, et ça perd tout sens.

Or, pour notre ami Gilbert, le vrai nonsense a un sens, et c’est précisément que le sens de la vie nous est caché ! On ne peut y accéder qu’en passant par le “Royaume des Elfes”.

Pas les délires formatés à la Lewis Carroll ; plutôt les rêveries inspirées à la C.S. Lewis… Je sais : Chesterton n’a connu que l’un des deux, et moi aucun. Mais à ce compte-là, qu’est ce qu’on fait de vous ?

En tout cas, ça serait con de se brouiller maintenant, surtout sans raison. Alors j’en ai trouvé une excellente : pinailler jusqu’au bout sur le sens du nonsense.
Deux erreurs de perspective, plutôt courantes ces derniers siècles, consistent d’un même mouvement à naturaliser le surnaturel et à surnaturaliser le naturel. Grâce au nonsense, prêche le père Gilbert, sortons enfin de ce cercle vicieux !
Admettons-le une fois pour toutes en souriant : quelque chose ici-bas nous dépasse ! “Et si les plus vieilles étoiles n’étaient que les étincelles d’un feu de joie allumé par un enfant ?”

Les enquêtes du Père Brown
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Omnibus

1. Et encore, il la partage avec l’excellent Hilaire Belloc (”Chesterton & Belloc : Apologia e Profezia”, Ed. Ancora). ↩
2. Du temps de son “Adversus Lutherum”, qui fait toujours autorité. ↩
3. Maternelle. L’autre était athée. ↩
4. Et encore, au deuxième degré ! ↩
5. Un des noms de Dieu dans la Bible. ↩
6. Que Chesterton et son pote Hilaire ont même tenté d’imiter ; mais on ne peut pas être doué pour tout, n’est ce pas ? Moi-même, etc. ↩
7. D’après moi. ↩
8. Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,
   Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,
   And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe
   The tedious gloom of philosophic pills ! ↩

Wyndham Lewis

Kerry Bolton / http://www.toqonline.com

Percy Wyndham Lewis, 1882 - 1957

Percy Wyndham Lewis is credited with being the founder of the only modernist cultural movement indigenous to Britain. Nonetheless, he is seldom spoken of in the same breath as his contemporaries, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others. Lewis was one of the number of cultural figures who rejected the bourgeois liberalism and democracy of the nineteenth century that descended on the twentieth. However, in contradiction to many other writers who eschewed democracy, liberalism, and “the Left,” Lewis also rejected the counter movement towards a return to the past and a resurgence of the intuitive, the emotional and the instinctual above the intellectual and the rational. Indeed, Lewis vehemently denounced D. H. Lawrence, for example, for his espousal of instinct above reason.

Lewis was an extreme individualist, whilst rejecting the individualism of nineteenth Century liberalism. His espousal of a philosophy of distance between the cultural elite and the masses brought him to Nietzsche, although appalled by the popularity of Nietzsche among all and sundry; and to Fascism and the praise of Hitler, but also the eventual rejection of these as being of the masses.

Born in 1882 on a yacht off the shores of Nova Scotia, his mother was English, his father an eccentric American army officer without income who soon deserted the family. Wyndham and his mother arrived in England in 1888. He attended Rugby and Slade public schools both of which obliged him to leave. He then wandered the art capitals of Europe and was influenced by Cubism and Futurism.

Wyndham Lewis, "Timon of Athens"

In 1922, Lewis exhibited his portfolio of drawings that had been intended to illustrate an edition of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, in which Timon is depicted as a snapping puppet. This illustrated Lewis’ view that man can rise above animal by a classical detachment and control, but the majority of men will always remain as puppets or automata. Having read Nietzsche, Lewis was intent on remaining a Zarathustrian type figure, solitary upon his mountain top far above the mass of humanity.

Vortex

Lewis was originally associated with the Bloomsbury group, the pretentious and snobbish intellectual denizens of a delineated area of London who could make or break an aspiring artist or writer. He soon rejected these parlor pink liberals and vehemently attacked them in The Apes of God. This resulted in Lewis largely being ignored as a significant cultural figure from this time onward. Breaking with Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshop, Lewis founded the Rebel Art Centre from which emerged the Vorticist movement and their magazine Blast. Signatories to the Vorticist Manifesto included Ezra Pound, French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and painter Edward Wadsworth.

Pound who described the vortex as “the point of maximum energy” coined the name Vorticism. Whilst Lewis had found both the stasis of Cubism and the frenzied movement of Futurism interesting, he became indignant at Mannetti’s description of him as a Futurist and wished to found an indigenous English modernist movement. The aim was to synthesis cubism and futurism. Vorticism would depict the static point from where energy arose. It was also very much concerned with reflecting contemporary life where the machine was coming to dominate, but rejected the Futurist romantic glorification of the machine.

Both Pound and Lewis were influenced by the Classicism of the art critic and philosopher T. E. Hulme, a radical conservative. Hulme rejected nineteenth century humanism and romanticism in the arts as reflections of the Rousseauian (and ultimately communistic) belief in the natural goodness of man when uncorrupted by civilization, as human nature infinitely malleable by a change of environment and social conditioning.

A definition of the classicism and romanticism, which are constant in Lewis’ philosophy, can be readily understood from what Hulme states in his publication Speculations:

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress. One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.

Wyndham Lewis, "Ezra Pound"

Lewis’s classicism is a dichotomy, classicism versus romanticism, reason versus emotion, intellect versus intuition and instinct, masculine versus feminine, aristocracy versus democracy, the individual versus the mass, and later fascism versus communism.

Artistically also classicism meant clarity of style and distinct form. Pound was drawn to the manner in which, for example, the Chinese ideogram depicted ideas succinctly. Hence, art and writing were to be based on terseness and clarity of image. The subject was viewed externally in a detached manner. Pound and Hulme had founded the Imagist movement on classicist lines. This was now superseded by Vorticism, depicting the complex but clear geometrical patterns of the machine age. In contradiction to Italian Futurism, Vorticist art aimed not to depict the release of energy but to freeze it in time. Whilst depicting the swirl of energy the central axis of stability dissociated Vorticism form Futurism.

The first issue of Blast describes Vorticism in terms of Lewis’ commitment to classicism:

Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the center of this town.
We stand for the reality of the Present-not the sentimental Future or the scarping Past . . .

We do not want to make people wear Futurist patches, or fuss people to take to pink or sky blue trousers . . .  Automobilisim (Marinetteism) bores us. We do not want to go about making a hullabaloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas pipes . . .  The Futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.

In 1916 his novel Tarr was published as a monument to himself should he be killed in the war in which he served as a forward observation officer with the artillery. Here he lambastes the bohemian artists and literati exemplified in England by the Bloomsbury coterie:

Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent Nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar bohemianism . . . . You are concentrated, highly-organized barley water; there is nothing in the universe to be said for you: any efficient state would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe–that old hat and the rest–as infectious, and prohibit you from propagating.

A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West . . .  that any resolute power will be able to wipe up over night with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a period of tribulation for live things to remain in your neighborhood. You are systematizing the vulgarizing of the individual: you are the advance copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism. You are not an individual: you have. I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too You should be in uniform and at work. NOT uniformly OUT OF UNIFORM and libeling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle? The only justification of your slovenly appearance it is true is that it’s perfectly emblematic.

There is much of Lewis’ outlook expressed here, the detestation of the pseudo-individualistic liberal among the intelligentsia and his desire to impose order in the name of Art. In 1918, he was commissioned as an official war artist for the Canadian War Records Office. Here some of his paintings are of the Vorticist style, depicting soldiers as machines of the same quality as their artillery. Once again, man is shown as an automaton. However, the war destroyed the Vorticist movement, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska both succumbing, and Blast did not go beyond two issues.

Wyndham Lewis, "A Battery Shelled" (1919)

In 1921, Lewis founded another magazine. Tyro: Review of the Arts. The title reflects Lewis’ view of man as automaton. Tyros are a mythical race of grotesque beings, all teeth and laughter. Satire is a major element of Lewis’ style. His exhibition “Tyros and Portraits” satirizes humanity.

The Code of a Herdsman

Lewis’ non-Nietzschean Nietzsechanism is succinctly put in an essay published in The Little Review in 1917, “The Code of a Herdsman.” Among the eighteen points:

In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman’s nature. Yourself must be your Caste.

Cherish and develop side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men . . .  Each trench must have another one behind it.

Spend some of your time every day in hunting your weaknesses caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up on the mountain . . .

Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine a fine herd though still a herd. There is no fine herd. The cattle that call themselves ‘gentlemen’ you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced by a product called soap . . .

Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen. There are very stringent regulations about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain In fact your chief function is to prevent their encroaching. Some in moment of boredom or vindictiveness are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noted Contradict yourself. In order to live you must remain broken up.

Above this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain “un peu sur la montagne” Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work. Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous than the wandering cylinders that emit them . . .  Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of the violence is peace. The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace.

Fascism

Wyndham Lewis, "The Artist's Wife, Froanna"

Poverty dogged Lewis all his life. He, like Pound, looked for a society that would honor artists. Like Pound and D. H. Lawrence, he felt that the artist is the natural ruler of humanity, and he resented the relegation of art as a commodity subject to the lowest denominator to be sold on a mass market.

Lewis’s political and social outlook arises form his aesthetics. He was opposed to the primacy of politics and economics over cultural life. His book The Art of Being Ruled in 1926 first details Lewis’s ideas on politics and a rejection of democracy with some favorable references to Fascism.

Support for Fascism was a product of his Classicism, hard, masculine, exactitude, and clarity. This classicism prompted him to applaud the “rigidly organized” Fascist State, based on changeless, absolute laws that Lewis applied to the arts, in opposition to the “flux” or changes of romanticism.

Lewis supported Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist movement, and Mosley records in his autobiography how Lewis would secretly arrange to meet him. However, Lewis was open enough to write an essay on Fascism entitled “Left wing” for British Union Quarterly, a magazine of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which included other well-known figures in its columns, such as the tank warfare specialist General Fuller, Ezra Pound, Henry Williamson, and Roy Campbell. Here Lewis writes that a nation can be subverted and taken over by numerically small groups. The intelligentsia and the press were doing this work of subversion with a left wing orientation. Lewis was aware of the backing Marxism was receiving from the wealthy, including the millionaire bohemians who patronized the arts. Marxist propaganda in favor of the USSR amounted to vast sums financially. Marxism is a sham, a masquerade in its championship of the poor against the rich.

That Russian communism is not a war to the knife of the Rich against the Poor is only too plainly demonstrated by the fact that internationally all the Rich are on its side. All the magnates among the nations are for it; all the impoverished communities, all the small peasant states, dread and oppose it.

That Lewis is correct in his observations on the nature of Marxism is evidenced by the anti-Bolshevist stance of Portugal and Spain for example, while Bolshevism itself was funded by financial circles in New York, Sweden, and Germany; the Warburgs, Schiff, and Olaf Aschberg the so-called “Bolshevik Banker.”

Lewis concludes his brief article for the BUF Quarterly by declaring Fascism to be the movement that is genuinely for the poor against the rich, who are for property whilst the “super-rich” are against property, “since money has merged into power, the concrete into the abstract . . . ”

You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain store; for the peasant against the usurer: for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of internationalisms.

Nonetheless, Lewis had reservations about Fascism just as he had reservations about commitment to any doctrine. For him the principle of action, of the man of action, becomes too much of a frenzied activity, where stability in the world is needed for the arts to flourish. He states in Time and Western Man that Fascism in Italy stood too much for the past, with emphasis on a resurgence of the Roman imperial splendor and the use of its imagery, rather than the realization of the present. As part of the “Time cult,” it was in the doctrinal stream of action, progress, violence, struggle, of constant flux in the world, that also includes Darwinism and Nietzscheanism despite the continuing influence of the latter on Lewis’s own philosophy.

Wyndham Lewis, "The Apes of God" (1930)

An early appreciation entitled Hitler was published in 1931, sealing Lewis’ fate as a neglected genius, despite his repudiation of both anti-Semitism in The Jews, Are They Human? and Nazism in The Hitler Cult both published in 1939.

Well before such books, Lewis’ satirizing and denigration of the bohemian liberal Bloomsbury set had resulted in what his self-styled “literary bodyguard,” the poet and fellow “Rightist” Roy Campbell, calls a “Lewis boycott” “When life’s bread and butter depended on thinking pro-Red and to generate one’s own ideas was a criminal offence.”

Time and Space

A healthy artistic environment requires order and discipline, not chaos and flux. This is the great conflict between the “romantic” and the “classical” in the arts. This dichotomy is represented in politics and the difference between the philosophy of “Time” and of “Space,” the former of which is epitomized in the philosophy of Spengler. Unlike many others of the “Right,” Lewis was vehemently opposed to the historical approach of Spengler, critiquing his Decline of the West in Time and Western Man. To Lewis, Spengler and other “Time philosophers” relegated culture to the political sphere. The cyclic and organic interpretations of history are seen as “fatalistic” and having a negative influence on the survival of the European race.

Lewis does not concur with Spengler, who sees culture as subordinate to historical epochs that rise and fall cyclically as living organisms. “There is no common historical and cultural outlook representing any specific cycle, but many ages co-existing simultaneously and represented by various individuals.”

This time philosophy was in contrast to that of Space or the Spatial, and resulted in the type of ongoing change or flux that Lewis opposed. Lewis looked with reverence to the Greeks, who existed in the Present, which he regarded Spengler as disparaging, in contrast to the “Faustian” urge of Western Man that looked to “destiny.”

Democracy

Lewis’s antipathy towards democracy is rooted in his theory on Time. Of democracy, he writes in Men Without Art, “No artist can ever love.” Democracy is hostility to artistic excellence and fosters “box office and library subscription standards.” Art is however timeless, classical.

Democracy hates and victimizes the intellectual because the “mind” is aristocratic and offensive to the masses. Here again Lewis is at odds with others of the “Right,” with particular antipathy toward D. H. Lawrence. Again, it is the dichotomy of the “romantic versus the classical.”

Conjoined with democracy is industrialization, both representing the masses against the solitary genius. The result is the “herding of people into enormous mechanized masses.” The “mass mind . . .  is required to gravitate to a standard size to receive the standard idea.”

Wyndham Lewis, "Self-Portrait"

Democracy and the advertisement are part and parcel of this debasement and behind it all stands money, including the “millionaire bohemians” who control the arts. Making a romantic image of the machine, starting in Victorian times, is the product of our “Money-age.” His opposition to Italian Futurism, often mistakenly equated with Vorticism, derives partly from Futurism’s idolization of the machine. Vorticism, states Lewis, depicts the machine as befits an art that observes the Present, but does not idolize it. It is technology that generates change and revolution, but art remains constant; it is not in revolt against anything other than when society promotes conditions where art does not exist, as in democracy.

In Lewis’s satirizing of the Bloomsbury denizens, he writes of the dichotomy existing between the elite and the masses, yet one that is not by necessity malevolent towards these masses:

The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything: but it is not a snobbish withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of work, of work not without its utility for the crowd . . .  More than the prophet or the religious teacher, (the leader) represents . . .  the great unworldly element in the world, and that is the guarantee of his usefulness. And he should be relieved of the futile competition in all sorts of minor fields, so that his purest faculties could be free for the major tasks of intelligent creation.

Unfortunately, placing one’s ideals onto the plane of activity results in vulgarization, a dilemma that caused Lewis’s reservations towards Nietzsche. In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis writes that of every good thing, there comes its “shadow,” “its ape and familiar.”

Lewis was still writing of this dilemma in Netting Hill during the 1950s.
“All the dilemmas of the creative seeking to function socially center upon the nature of action: upon the necessity of crude action, of calling in the barbarian to build a civilizations.” This was of course the dilemma for Lewis in his early support for Hitler and for Italian Fascism.

Revolt of the Primitive

Other symptoms of the romantic epoch subverting cultural standards include the feminine principle, with the over representation of homosexuals and the effete among the literati and the Bloomsbury coterie; the cult of the primitive; and the “cult of the child,” that is closely related to the adulation of the primitive.

Female values, resting on the intuitive and emotional, undermine masculine rationality, the intellect–the feminine flux against the masculine hardness of stability and discipline. To Lewis revolutions are a return to the past. Feminism aims at returning society to an idealized primitive matriarchy. Communism aims at a returning to primitive forms of common ownership. The idolization of the savage and the child are also returns to the atavistic. The millionaire world and “High Bohemia” support these, as it does other vulgarizing revolutions. The supposedly outrageous, to Lewis, is tame.

Lewis’s book Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot inspired as a counter-blast to D. H. Lawrence, was written to repudiate the cult of the primitive, fashionable among the millionaire bohemians, as it had been among the parlor intellectuals of the eighteenth century; the Rousseauean ideal of the “return to nature” and the “noble savage.” Although D. H. Lawrence was writing of the primitive tribes to inspire a decadent European race to return to its own instinctual being, such “romanticism” is contrary to the classicism of Lewis, with its primacy of reason. In contradiction of Lawrence, Lewis states that,

I would rather have an ounce of human consciousness than a universe full of “abdominal” afflatus and hot, unconscious, “soulless” mystical throbbing.

Wyndham Lewis, Blast, no. 2

In Paleface Lewis calls for a ruling caste of aesthetes, much like his friend Ezra Pound and his philosophical opposite Lawrence:

We by birth the natural leaders of the white European, are people of no political or public consequence any more . . .  We, the natural leaders of the world we live in, are now private citizens in the fullest sense, and that world is, as far as the administration of its traditional law of life is concerned, leaderless. Under these circumstances, its soul, in a generation or so, will be extinct.

Lewis opposes the “melting pot” where different races and nationalities are becoming indistinguishable. Once again, Lewis’ objections are aesthetic at their foundation. The Negro gift to the white man is jazz, “the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian subconscious,” degrading, and exciting the masses into mindless energy, an “idiot mass sound” that is “Marxistic.”

Compulsory Freedom

By the time Lewis wrote Time and Western Man he believed that people would have to be “compelled” to be free and individualistic. Reversing certain of his views espoused in The Art of Being Ruled, he now no longer believed that the urge of the masses to be enslaved should be organized, but rather that the masses will have to be compelled to be individualistic.

I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day and a week’s solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in mountain scenery), every two months would be an excellent provision. That and other coercive measures of a similar kind, I think, would make them much better people.

Return to Socialist England

In 1939, Lewis and his wife went to the USA and on to Canada where Lewis lectured at Assumption College, a situation that did not cause discomfort, as he had long had a respect for Catholicism although not a convert. Lewis as a perpetual polemicist began a campaign against extreme abstraction in art, attacking Jackson Pollock and the Expressionists.

Lewis returned to England in 1945, and despite being completely blind by 1951 continued writing, in 1948 his America and Cosmic Man portrayed the USA as the laboratory for a coming new world order of anonymity and utilitarianism. He also received some “official” recognition in being commissioned to write two dramas for BBC radio, and becoming a regular columnist for The Listener.

A post-war poem, So the Man You Are autobiographically continues to reflect some of Lewis’ abiding themes; that of the creative individual against the axis of the herd and “High Finances”:

The man I am to blow the bloody gaff
If I were given platforms? The riff-raff
May be handed all the trumpets that you will.
No so the golden-tongued. The window sill
Is all the pulpit they can hope to get.

Lewis had been systematically stifled since before World War I when he broke with the Bloomsbury wealthy parlor Bolsheviks who ruled the cultural establishment in Britain. Lewis continued with “Herdsman’s principles of eschewing both Bolshevism and Plutocracy, staying above the herd in solitude”:

What wind an honest mind advances? Look
No wind of sickle and hammer, of bell and book,
No wind of any party, or blowing out
Of any mountain blowing us about
Of High Finance, or the foot-hills of same.
The man I am he who does not play the game!

Lewis felt that “everything was drying up” in England, “extremism was eating at the arts and the rot was pervasive in all levels of society.” He writes of post-war England:

This is the capital of a dying empire–not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.

Wyndham Lewis, "Portrait of Edith Sitwell"

This is the England he portrays in his 1951 novel Rotting Hill (Ezra Pound’s name for Netting Hill) where Lewis and his wife lived. The Welfare State symbolizes a shoddy utility standard in the pursuit of universal happiness. Socialist England causes everything to be substandard including shirt buttons that don’t fit the holes, shoelaces too short to tie, scissors that won’t cut, and inedible bread and jam. Lewis seeks to depict the socialist drabness of 1940s Britain.

Unlike most of the literati, who rebelled against Leftist dominance in the arts, Lewis continued to uphold an ideal of a world culture overseen by a central world state. He wrote his last novel The Red Priest in 1956. Lewis died in 1957, eulogized by T. S. Eliot in an obituary in The Sunday Times: “a great intellect has gone.”

Chapter 8 of K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003).

Citation de D. H. Lawrence

Archives de SYNERGIES EUROPEENNES - 1999

APOCALYPSE:

Un commentaire païen de l'Apocalypse selon Saint-Jean

 

«L'Apocalypse nous montre ce à quoi nous résistons, résistance contre-nature, nous résistons à nos connexions avec le cosmos, avec le monde, la nation, la famille. Toutes nos connexions sont anathèmes dans l'Apocalypse, et anathèmes encore en nous. Nous ne pouvons pas supporter la connexion. C'est notre maladie. Nous avons besoin de casser, d'être isolés. Nous appelons cela liberté, individualisme. Au-delà d'un certain point, que nous avons atteint, c'est du suicide. Peut-être avons-nous choisi le suicide. C'est bon. L'Apocalypse aussi choisit le suicide, avec l'auto-glorification que cela implique.

 

Mais l'Apocalypse montre, par sa résistance même, les choses auxquelles le cœur humain aspire secrètement. La frénésie que met l'Apocalypse à détruire le soleil et les étoiles, le monde, tous les rois et tous les chefs, la pourpre, l'écarlate et le cinnamome, toutes les prostituées et finalement tous les hommes qui n'ont pas reçu le “sceau” nous fait découvrir à quel point les auteurs désiraient le soleil et les étoiles et la terre et les eaux de la terre, la noblesse et la souveraineté et la puissance, la splendeur de l'or et de l'écarlate, l'amour passionné et une union juste entre les hommes indépendamment de cette histoire de “sceau”. Ce que l'homme désire le plus passionnément, c'est sa totalité vivante, une forme de vie à l'unisson, et non le salut personnel et solitaire de son “âme”.

 

L'homme veut d'abord et avant tout son accomplissement physique, puisqu'il vit maintenant, pour une fois et une fois seulement, dans sa chair et sa force. Pour l'homme, la grande merveille est d'être en vie. Pour l'homme, comme pour la fleur, la bête et l'oiseau, le triomphe suprême, c'est d'être le plus parfaitement, le plus vivement vivant. Quoi que puissent savoir les morts et les non-nés, ils ne peuvent rien connaître de la beauté, du prodige d'être en vie dans la chair. Que les morts apprêtent l'après, mais qu'ils nous laissent la splendeur de l'instant présent, de la vie dans la chair qui est à nous, à nous seuls et seulement pour une fois. Nous devrions danser de bonheur d'être vivants et dans la chair, d'être une parcelle du cosmos vivant incarné. Je suis une parcelle du soleil comme mon oeil est une parcelle de moi-même. Mon pied sait très bien que je suis une parcelle de la terre, et mon sang est une parcelle de la mer. Mon âme sait que je suis une parcelle de la race humaine, mon âme est une partie organique de l'âme de l'humanité, tout comme mon esprit, une parcelle de ma nation. Dans mon moi le plus privé, je fais partie de ma famille. Rien en moi n'est solitaire ni absolu, sauf ma pensée, et nous découvrirons que la pensée n'a pas d'existence propre, qu'elle n'est que le miroitement du soleil à la surface des eaux.

 

Si bien que mon individualisme est en fait une illusion. Je suis une parcelle du Grand Tout, et n'y échapperai jamais. Mais je peux nier mes connexions, les casser, devenir un fragment. Alors, c'est la misère.

 

Ce que nous voulons, c'est détruire nos fausses connexions inorganiques, en particulier celles qui ont trait à l'argent, et rétablir les connexions organiques vivantes avec le cosmos, le soleil et la terre, avec l'humanité, la nation et la famille. Commencer avec le soleil, et le reste viendra lentement, très lentement».

(D. H. LAWRENCE, Apocalypse, 1931; éditions Balland, Paris, 1978 pour la traduction française, pp. 210 à 212).

 

Gilbert K. Chesterton, la ironia hecha inocencia

Gilbert K. Chesterton, la ironía hecha inocencia

Un escritor y pensador ameno en él que incluso sus novelas más ligeras tienen un mensaje

Ex: http://www.arbil.org/

Gilbert K. Chesterton fue uno de los más famosos y polémicos escritores ingleses de este siglo.

Este periodista británico nació en el seno de una familia pudiente de mentalidad liberal y protestante.

Sin embargo, su búsqueda de la verdad le llevó a ser después de Newman uno de los casos más llamativos de conversión al catolicismo en la Inglaterra victoriana.

Nacido el 29 de mayo de 1874 en el barrio londinense de Kensington, en una familia de corredores de fincas.

A los cinco años nació su hermano Cecil, con quien discutiría de temas intelectuales.

Ya en la escuela demuestra su interés por la polémica y forma parte de un club de debate.

De joven, su padre le hace inscribirse en Bellas Artes, es más fácil que el joven Gilbert viva del dibujo, que de escritor.

Pero desde 1895, Gilbert abandona el dibujo y decide dedicarse a escribir para una pequeña editorial.

Con ingresos mínimos se enamora de Frances, una anglocatólica de pobres recursos, menuda y tímida, con la cual iniciará un largo noviazgo que les llevará al matrimonio en 1901.

Como era natural, a Gilbert se le perdió la corbata, perdieron luego el tren y finalmente llegaron tarde al hotel donde les esperaban para la luna de miel.

Por cuestiones de salud de élla nunca pudieron tener hijos lo que les unió más en una simbiosis platónica castigada por la ausencia de descendencia.

A pesar de todo, su casa se convirtió en lugar de reunión deescritores y periodistas, donde siempre encontraban cerveza y salchichas.

Gilbert recorría las tabernas vecinas y polemizaba aficionado al borgoña y al jerez.

Sin embargo, de su excesivo trabajo, acompañado de la bebida le llevó a tener problemas cardiacos.


Gilbert K. Chesterton, con un descomunal físico y maneras de sabio despistado, fue un gran literato en la lengua inglesa con Un hombre llamado jueves, Las historias del P. Brown, La esfera y la cruz, La balada del caballo blanco, Magia, Ortodoxia, San Francisco de Asís, Santo Tomás de Aquino y otras más.

No obstante, no pasará a la historia únicamente por su labor literaria, al haberse cruzado en su camino un escritor anglofrancés de firme carácter católico, Hilarie Belloc.

Belloc era un defensor a ultranza de la justicia social frente al liberalismo capitalista y al socialismo marxista.

Pronto el anglofrancés convenció a Cecil Chesterton, hermano del novelista, para que colaborase con él en varias revistas, donde difundieron sus teorías inspiradas en las ideas que León XIII había desarrollado en la Encíclica Rerum Novarum.

Estas ideas que fomentaban la formación de una sociedad orgánica como mejor sistema para evitar las desigualdades sociales fue conocido en Inglaterra como distribucionalismo.

Pero, cuando en la Primera Guerra Mundial falleció Cecil en Francia, su hermano Gilbert decidió ocupar su puesto y colaborar con Belloc en la difusión del corporativismo católico.

Del mismo modo, en que Cecil se había convertido al catolicismo, Gilbert aceptó la Fe romana en julio de 1922, ya que había llegado al convencimiento de que las diferentes formas anglicanas eran pálidos reflejos de la verdadera Iglesia encabezada por el Papa.

El P. O`Connor, un sacerdote irlandés, con el cual tuvo sus polémicas y una antigua amistad, sirviéndole el clérigo de inspiración para su personaje literario el P. Brown


La conversión de Gilbert K. Chesterton fue tomada como la máxima provocación.

Pero Frances, su esposa, le acompañará en 1926 en su entrada en la Iglesia Católica, como su secretaria Dorothy Collins poco después.

Gilbert mantiene una gran intensidad de trabajo con conferencias que le lleva por Canada, Estados Unidos, Polonia y España.

Al mismo tiempo que publica "El retorno del Quijote" y "La vida de Santo Tomás de Aquino", Chesterton fue un periodista crítico y contracorriente que defendió el nacionalismo británico en contra del imperialismo victoriano dominante, lo que le llevó a posicionarse a favor de los böers en la guerra sudafricana y de los fascistas italianos en su toma de Abisinia.

Pero su lucha principal fue contra el parlamentarismo, al que acusaba de representar a la plutocracia política que dirigía el país y oprimía a la mayoría de la población.

Para Chesterton y Belloc, las elecciones no tenían importancia al no variar substancialmente la política.

Los resultados producían alternancias del poder entre miembros de una élite política entrelazada en intereses comunes, pero que no representaban los de la sociedad.

En cambio, el corporativismo representaría más fielmente los intereses de la sociedad real.

Chesterton y Belloc creían que esta forma política se había dado ya en la historia con éxito en la Edad Media y había que readaptarla a la época contemporanea.

El organicismo natural de la sociedad se había perdido definitivamente con la aparición del protestantismo.

Al ser la Iglesia católica la inspiradora de esa tercera alternativa al capitalismo y al socialismo.

No es raro ver como los hermanos Chesterton decidieron dar el paso hacia el catolicismo después de su lucha política por la justicia social

Su último viaje le lleva de peregrinación a Lourdes y Lisieux, pero a su vuelta debe guardar descanso.

Frances le cuida con esmero y únicamente el P. O`Connor es recibido por el obeso escritor.

Los problemas económicos se mantienen, las ganancias obtenidas por los éxitos publicados y las conferencias dadas suplen las deudas que proporciona la revista que mantiene con Hilaire Belloc.

Sin embargo, en junio empeora su estado, el P. Vincent Mc Nabb O.P. le reza el Salve Regina, costumbre que tiene la orden con sus miembros moribundos.

El 14 de junio de 1936 murió Gilbert, su mujer Frances, únicamente le sobrevivivó dos años

J.L.O.

James Graham Ballard nous a quittés...

 

Claudio ASCIUTI:

 

James Graham Ballard nous a quittés...

 

James Graham Ballard, l’écrivain pessimiste et cyberpunk a disparu

 

Les “crocodiles” du journalisme italien sont des animaux étranges. Pendant longtemps, ces “crocodiles”  —expression italienne pour désigner les fiches biographiques d’hommes et de femmes célèbres que l’on conserve dans les rédactions des journaux—  demeurent dans les tiroirs secrets des experts auto-proclamés des médias. On ne les libère de leur prison poussiéreuse qu’à la mort de l’être d’exception qui a justifié leur existence. Aujourd’hui, ces “crocodiles” n’ont presque plus raison d’être: il suffit de faire une petite promenade sur la grande toile, de consulter par paresse Wikipedia et le tour est joué! Tout défunt qui vient fraîchement de décéder, et dont on ignore tout ou quasi tout, trouve subitement, face à son cadavre, une foultitude d’experts qui, par une sorte de parthénogénèse, lui taillent de belles biographies posthumes, véritables “crocodiles” de brics et de brocs, de vérités toute faites et d’approximations. Le 25 février 2009, le grand Philip José Farmer nous quittait et aucun de nos quotidiens nationaux ne lui a consacré une ligne. Le 19 avril 2009, c’était au tour d’un autre grand écrivain anglo-saxon de passer de vie à trépas: James Graham Ballard. Les journalistes italiens de service lui ont consacré des articles, tous égaux, tous similaires, ce qui nous donne l’impression que tous ces zélotes de nécrologues avaient l’habitude de dormir avec ses oeuvres sous l’oreiller.

 

 

C’est faux. Evidemment. Seul le quotidien “L’Unità” a choisi un homme digne d’écrire une rubrique nécrologique substantielle à l’occasion de la disparition de James Graham Ballard. Cet homme est Antonio Caronia, spécialiste universitaire de l’imaginaire moderne et traducteur de notre écrivain anglais. Les autres nécrologues zélés ne savaient manifestement pas qui était Ballard: dans leurs “crocodiles”, ils nous ont décrit un homme et sa littérature mais c’était un homme et une littérature qui n’existaient pas. Ou bien ils ont glosé, de manière conventionnelle,  sur d’autres problématiques, déconnectées de la biographie réelle de l’écrivain. Ils évoquaient certes le titre de ses livres mais ceux-ci, sous leur plume, semblaient changer de contenu. On peut même se demander s’il s’agissait bien des mêmes livres. Ou du même auteur...

 

Ballard fut essentiellement un écrivain de science-fiction, qui n’a pas “renié”, comme quelqu’un l’a écrit, ses oeuvres antérieures à 1962, année où il a inventé l’ “inner space”, l’espace intérieur, évoqué dans les “crocodiles” les moins banals mais sans que leurs auteurs ne comprennent réellement de quoi il s’agit. Alors que c’est fondamental. Avec cet “espace intérieur”, Ballard a provoqué une grande révolution dans ce genre littéraire, tout en déclarant, comme bien d’autres dans les années 60, que c’était fini d’écrire encore et toujours comme on l’avait fait auparavant. Les temps avaient changé: la littérature devait changer elle aussi. Ballard s’est donc mis au travail, à fond, jusqu’à pouvoir dépasser les conventions du genre; il s’est mis à écrire des thrillers dans une sphère postmoderne. Le succès mondial est alors arrivé, avec le roman autobiographique “L’Empire du Soleil” (1984); c’est par cet ouvrage que les intellectuels et le grand public l’ont découvert. Lorsque, trois ans plus tard, Steven Spielberg en a tiré un film homonyme et lorsque la vogue du “cyberpunk” l’élit comme son “père putatif”,  alors le monde a su que Ballard était prêt à être “embaumé” dans le mastaba de la littérature.

 

D’où cette volonté des fauteurs de “crocodiles” de donner à leurs lecteurs un cadre préétabli  pour l’oeuvre et une définition homologuée de l’auteur, cadre et définition qui font de lui un écrivan présentable, digne de figurer dans les hautes sphères de la culture officielle, après avoir expurger la science-fiction du discours. Ballard est ainsi devenu un précurseur de la vogue “cyberpunk”, un écrivain décrété “subversif” à la façon des médiacrates, un révolutionnaire, un prophète du futur, un visionnaire, celui qui utilise la science-fiction pour dénoncer le monde moderne, alors qu’en réalité Ballard n’écrivait pas de science-fiction. Et dans la foulée, Ballard est également devenu un anti-fasciste bon teint, un philo-américain. Mais le Ballard, que mes amis et moi avons connu, celui que nous avons aimé, est bien différent de l’image que lui ont taillée les fauteurs de “crocodiles”. Et c’est bien sûr notre vision que nous aimerions évoquer dans cet hommage. Les éléments biographiques coïncident, entre nous et les “crocodiles”, mais non les résultats, non le jugement final à porter sur l’homme et sur l’oeuvre. C’est comme ses livres: mêmes titres mais autres contenus.

 

 

Le Ballard, dont nous aimons nous souvenir aujourd’hui, est né à Changhai, en Chine, en 1930, dans une famille anglaise. Elle a été internée dans le camp de détention japonais de Lunghua de mars 1943 à août 1945. Ballard n’utilisera jamais cette détention pour en tirer de quelconques avantages ou pour se faire valoir. Au contraire, en dépit des privations et de la violence des gardiens, il ne cessera de considérer ces deux années comme les meilleures de sa vie. Il témoignera amitié et respect pour les Japonais et l’image que son art nous a léguée, celle du gamin anglais auquel les soldats nippons enseignent le kendo, est très belle. Son père, après la guerre, témoignera d’ailleurs en faveur du premier commandant du camp, Hyashi. Ballard décrira également les avions japonais et anglais, et surtout américains, qu’il verra en action; dès son retour en Grande-Bretagne et après avoir terminé sa scolarité, il s’engagera comme volontaire dans la RAF et partira pour le Canada, où il acquerra toutes les techniques du pilote. C’est quand il servait dans les rangs de la RAF que Ballard a découvert la science-fiction et décidé de devenir écrivain. Il donne sa démission, retourne en Angleterre et commence à écrire des nouvelles.

 

Avec “Prima Belladonna” (1956), il sort de l’anonymat. Avec cet ouvrage, il crée le noyau central de ce que l’on appellera “le cycle de Vermillon Sands”, d’après le nom du lieu où se déroulent les récits. Un lieu qu’il définit comme “les périphéries exotiques de son esprit”, avec un scénario inspiré de Dali et de Tanguy autant que d’Ernst, avec voiliers de sable et scorpions gemmés, et surtout les destins obscurs qui accablent les protagonistes de ses nouvelles et romans. Il suffit de penser à “Mers de sable”, qui reprend et rappelle Coleridge et sa “Balade du vieux marin”, pour se rendre compte de l’ampleur du discours narratif ancré dans “Vermillon Sands”.

 

 

Mis à part ce cycle, les nouvelles de Ballard forment, à elles seules, une sorte de second texte: “La parade des atrocités”, qui n’est pas un roman comme l’ont écrit les fauteurs de “crocodiles” mais un recueil de quinze nouvelles qui ont eu un impact très puissant sur l’imaginaire contemporain; il s’agit d’écrits de style expérimental, sorte de croisement entre Dos Passos, William Burroughs et James Joyce. La censure américaine a frappé ces récits de l’anathème d’une interdiction et c’est là, d’après les fauteurs de “crocodiles”, que réside la marque essentielle de cette oeuvre. En réalité, la première édition américaine de 1970 a été envoyée au pilon parce qu’elle contenait un récit (et non un article comme on l’a écrit) intitulé “Pourquoi vouloir enc.. Ronald Reagan”. Ce récit a fait, comme on s’en doute, la réputation de Ballard, tout comme, d’ailleurs, un autre, intitulé, lui, “Plan pour l’assassinat de Jacqueline Kennedy”. Et si le titre n’est pas dû à l’auteur lui-même, “Amour et napalm: les Etats-Unis organisent leurs exportations” en dit long sur son contenu. Le récit le plus célèbre de Ballard, dans cette veine, demeure toutefois “La mort de John Fritz Kennedy considérée comme une course automobile en vrille”. L’idée de Ballard était la suivante: si on commence un récit par la mort de Kennedy, on peut amorcer une construction de la réalité par le truchement des médias; surtout aux Etats-Unis, nous assistons, par le jeu permanent des médias, à la création constante d’une nouvelle mythologie avec des individus et futurs héros de l’imaginaire contemporain, tels Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean et Reagan, dont Ballard avait prédit avec beaucoup de lucidité l’élection au poste de Président. Précisons que notre écrivain anglais si raffiné n’est pas anti-américain.

 

Après “La parade des atrocités”, on aurait pu penser que tous les écrits de science-fiction que l’auteur écrirait ultérieurement déboucherait sur la farce. Mais Ballard a continué. Depuis la fin des années 50 jusqu’à la fin de son itinéraire littéraire, il a bousculé le concept même de science-fiction et, dans son oeuvre, publiée en quatre volumes en Italie chez Fanucci après que Mondadori en ait cédé les droits, il me paraît impossible d’établir une hiérarchie, de dire que ceci est meilleur que cela. De l’oeuvre de Ballard, on peut dire qu’elle a exploré le présent ou, mieux, les plis et replis d’événements occultés de notre présent: des “aliens” invisibles qui nous espionnent, des explosions nucléaires, des simulations d’événements, les régressions psychologiques des individus. Les fauteurs de “crocodiles” n’ont pas perçu la similitude qui existe, indubitablement, entre Ballard et le grand poète anglais Thomas Stearns Eliot et sa théorie de l’ “objectif corrélatif”  —mais on pourrait dire aussi qu’ils n’ont pas vu, non plus, le lien entre Ballard et un autre grand poète, Italien celui-là: Eugenio Montale. Selon l’idée de l’ “objectif corrélatif”, l’espace physique extérieur devient la manifestation de l’espace intérieur. Les terrains d’aviation abandonnés, les carcasses amoncelées de vieilles voitures ou alignées de bombardiers déclassés, de hangars délaissés, d’espaces évacués par leurs habitants, de dunes, de marais, d’habitations vides, de plages désertes, de cieux si vifs qu’ils aveuglent, de soleils implacables, voilà tous les paysages, termes des équations narratives de l’écrivain. Ce sont des espaces géographiques d’une valeur unique, qui deviennent les expressions et les symboles d’un mal-être intérieur.

 

L’autre Ballard que nous entendons commémorer est le romancier, celui de “Vent de nulle part” (1961), “Le monde submergé” (1962), “Terre brûlée” (1964), “Forêt de cristal” (1966). Avec ces quatres livres, Ballard a réussi à décrire quatre types différents d’apocalypses de science-fiction. Ces romans témoignent d’une sensibilité écologique, qui, à l’époque, en était à ses premiers balbutiements. Ils mettaient en scène des modes divers par lesquels la Terre allait finir par frapper ses propres habitants, chaque fois à l’aide des quatre éléments alchimiques. Mais “Le monde submergé” et “Forêt de cristal” parient sur un registre plus vaste, en faisant implicitement référence aux symboles mythiques de l’eau et du cristal; l’individu s’y perd en régressant sur l’échelle de l’évolution, dans un monde submergé sous les eaux et devenu ansi un gigantesque marais ou dans une forêt qui, lentement, minéralise ses arbres et les êtres qui y  habitent. L’étape suivante de l’oeuvre ballardienne est marquée par “Crash” (1973), élaboration nouvelle du récit homonyme paru dans “La parade des atrocités”. “Crash” met l’accent sur un problème devenu, au fil du temps, une triste réalité contemporaine: la manie automobiliste qui contamine tous les hommes et provoque une avanlanche ininterrompue d’accidents de la route. Dans le roman de Ballard, l’automobile est devenu un ersatz de la sexualité; un groupe de personnes met en scène les grands accidents de l’histoire de l’imaginaire moderne: la séduction, la mort au volant, le fétichisme des images, tout cela devient autant de points de référence. Quand David Cronemberg fait de ce roman un film du même nom, en 1997, les bien-pensants furent atterrés.

 

 

 

Par la suite, Ballard a travaillé sur des romans largement autobiographiques sinon carrément biographiques: “L’Empire du Soleil”, que nous venons d’évoquer, et aussi “La gentillesse des femmes” (1991). Quant aux ouvrages ultérieurs des années 90, ceux qui permettent aux fauteurs de “crocodiles” de crier au miracle, ils recèlent tantôt une dimension écologiste, comme “Le paradis du diable” (1994), tantôt mettent au goût du jour sa poétique du désastre en situant l’intrigue des thrillers à la Costa del Sol ou en France; enfin, “Le Règne à venir” (2006) appartient aussi à la catégorie des bons romans, mais tous ces livres des années 90 et de la première décennie du 21ème siècle n’ont plus ni l’intensité destructrice ni la magie charmante du premier Ballard. Le passage du monde décapant de la science fiction à celui de la “haute” littérature, a certes apporté la consécration à notre auteur, l’a hissé dans l’empyrée des écrivains aimés du grand public et des intellectuels; ce n’est donc pas un hasard si tous ses romans sont aujourd’hui publiés par Feltrinelli en Italie, alors qu’auparavant ses oeuvres étaient éditées dans la collection de science fiction de Mondadori. Ce passage a fatalement transformé sa force  créatrice et l’a infléchie dans une direction nouvelle. Les fauteurs de “crocodiles” n’ont évidemment jamais lu les pages qu’il écrivait dans la légendaire revue anglaise “New Worlds”, et encore moins les récits qui l’ont fait découvrir et l’ont intronisé “grand écrivain”. Par conséquent, à la lecture de ces textes-là, nous pouvons dire qu’il est vraiment “réducteur” de confiner Ballard dans le seul rayon de science fiction.

 

Le Ballard que nous aimons n’est pas le Ballard des grands médias, des intellectuels médiatisés et médiacrates. C’est bien davantage l’homme qui a rédigé sa propre biographie (“Les miracles de la vie”), éditée depuis peu de temps seulement en Italie, chez Feltrinelli. Dans ce récit autobiographique, Ballard affirme qu’après le camp de prisonniers les meilleurs moments de sa vie sont tous ceux liés à son épouse (qui mourra jeune) et à ses trois fils qui se sont débrouillés seuls et qui, par là même, constituent des miracles, bien plus que ses livres. Il est resté quarante ans avec la même compagne et il en parle avec le même enthousiasme qu’il y a quatre décennies.

 

L’auteur que nous lisions quand nous étions adolescents dans les années 60 et 70 dans les pages de la revue “Urania”, qui nous faisait découvrir les pistes nouvelles de la science fiction où il n’y avait plus de vaisseaux spatiaux, de voyages intersidéraux, d’envahisseurs extra-terrestres mais seulement une volonté bien précise de parler du présent et de ses maux, à travers, par exemple, le corps d’un géant abandonné sur une plage, l’ampleur d’un baiser, un delta grouillant de serpents, de mystérieuses tours d’observation qui descendent du ciel, la carcasse d’un B52. C’est donc ce même homme qui, après une vie qui ne fut guère facile, n’a pas sombré dans les pleurnicheries ou dans les invectives,  comme beaucoup d’autres, mais, au contraire, s’est retroussé les manches pour affronter le réel sans faiblir. Et il termine son autobiographie en annonçant à ses lecteurs qu’il est miné par un cancer et que, par conséquent, ils viennent de lire ses dernières lignes.

 

Je me rappellerai toujours le “gentleman” du Festival du Dragon de Viareggio en 1992 quand, avec ma copine et un ami, je m’étais faufilé parmi les “VIP” pour me retrouver  finalement à sa table, sans y avoir été invité; nous étions là, tous les trois inconnus, en shorts, en maillots de rugby, les cheveux longs. Ballard ne parlait pas italien et, nous, nous ne parlions pas anglais: cela ne l’a nullement empêché de dîner avec nous, ce soir-là, en irradiant une gentillesse toute britannique (soit dit en passant: à peu près toutes les grandes huiles de la littérature italienne auraient fait appel aux services de sécurité pour nous faire virer illico...). Ballard souriait et parlait, interrompu par une interprète. Il y avait là un grand écrivain mondialement connu et trois de ces lecteurs italiens les plus férus incapables de balbutier la moindre parole. Je n’en dirai pas  davantage. Merci, James, bon vol. Et bon atterrissage.

 

Claudio ASCIUTI.

(article paru dans le quotidien romain “Rinascita”, 25-26 avril 2009; traduction et adaptation française:  Robert Steuckers).

Portret C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

C.S. LEWIS

door Bart Jan Spruyt - http://bitterlemon.eu/

 

"Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority – because the scientists say so. (...) A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life."

Clive Staples Lewis werd op 29 november 1898 in Belfast geboren uit ouders die nominaal lid waren van de Anglicaanse Kerk. Zijn vader, waarmee Lewis een groot deel van zijn leven een problematische verhouding had, was advocaat en stamde uit een sociaal geëmancipeerd Engels arbeidersmilieu. Zijn moeder was van vaders kant afkomstig uit een Schots-Iers predikantengezin en van moeders kant stamde zij uit een oud Anglo-Normandisch geslacht dat zich onder Hendrik II in Ierland gevestigd had. Op dat laatste was Lewis als jongeman erg trots.

Samen met zijn drie jaar oudere broer Warren beleefde hij een gelukkige kindertijd. Centraal in hun bestaan stond een fantasiewereld, uitgedrukt in zelf geschreven sprookjes, tekeningen en sILLEtjes, al snel mede gevoed uit de omvangrijke ouderlijke boekerij waar de kinderen onbeperkte toegang toe hadden. Zo vermeldde Lewis als tienjarige in zijn dagboek: “Paradise Lost gelezen, erover nagedacht.” Daar is hij nog vele jaren mee doorgegaan, getuige het in 1942 verschenen A Preface to Paradise Lost. Aan deze gelukkige periode kwam abrupt een einde door de vroege dood van zijn moeder. Vervolgens bracht hij enkele jaren door op twee Engelse kostscholen die hem tot laat in zijn leven depressief makende herinneringen opleverden. In zijn autobiografie Surprised by Joy (1955) heeft hij maar liefst zeven hoofdstukken nodig om dit liefdeloze en intellectueel afstompende milieu te beschrijven.

In 1916 won Lewis een beurs voor University College in Oxford, maar moest al spoedig zijn studie afbreken om als negentienjarige officier zijn land te dienen in de Noord-Franse loopgraven. In april 1918 kwam er een eind aan zijn oorlogservaringen door een ernstige granaatwond die hij opliep tijdens de Slag bij Arras. Na de oorlog hervatte hij zijn studie in Oxford. Hij studeerde er cum laude af in de klassieke talen, in de klassieke filosofie en in de Engelse taal- en letterkunde. Vanaf 1925 was hij als fellow in de Engelse taal- en leterkunde verbonden aan Magdalen College. Nadat hij gedurende zijn jeugd langere tijd van het christendom vervreemd was geraakt, begon rond die tijd ook een proces van religieuze heroriëntatie. Onder andere onder invloed van de dood van zijn vader en als gevolg van gesprekken met gelovige collega's als J.R.R. Tolkien en Hugo Dyson bekeerde hij zich tot het christendom. Zoals hij later in Surprised by Joy zou beschrijven vond de eigenlijke bekering plaats op 22 september 1931 tijdens een tochtje in de zijspan van de motorfiets van zijn broer. Als eerste literaire neerslag van zijn bekering publiceerde hij The Pilgrim's Regress (1932), een geestrijke allegorie naar het model van John Bunyan's boek.

Een nationaal bekend figuur zou Lewis pas tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog worden. Die bekendheid kreeg hij enerzijds door een aantal druk beluisterde lezingen over filosofische en religieuze onderwerpen voor de BBC-microfoon. Een aantal van die lezingen werden later gebundeld onder de titel Mere Christianity (1952), nog steeds een van zijn meest gelezen boeken. Daarnaast verscheen in 1942 het eerste publiekssucces, The Screwtape Letters, dat in het eerste jaar negen drukken kende en een jaar later eenzelfde succes kende in de Verenigde Staten.

Tot 1954 werkte hij onafgebroken in Oxford. In dat jaar werd hij in Cambridge benoemd op een speciaal voor hem ingestelde leerstoel voor letterkunde. In 1956 trouwde hij met de Amerikaanse Joy Davidham Gresham, een gescheiden voormalige communiste die zich onder invloed van Lewis’ boeken tot het christendom bekeerd had. Vier jaar later al stierf zij. In een van zijn laatste boeken, A Grief Observed (1961), dat onder het pseudoniem N.W. Clerk verscheen, probeerde hij verslag te doen van dit verschrikkelijke verlies. C.S. Lewis stierf op 22 november 1963, de dag dat John F. Kennedy in Dallas werd neergeschoten. Hij ligt begraven op het kerkhof van de Holy Trinity Church in Headington, Oxford.

Volgens zijn levenslange vriend Owen Barfield zijn er in zekere zin drie “C.S. Lewissen” geweest. Tijdens zijn leven heeft Lewis aan drie verschillende roepingen succesvol beantwoord. Op de eerste plaats was daar de gerespecteerde Oxford-docent, literatuurgeleerde en literair criticus. Daarnaast de schrijver van romans en kinderboeken. En ten slotte was er de populaire en invloedrijke apologeet, filosoof en volkstheoloog die veel lezers (opnieuw) op een verfrissende wijze het christendom binnen leidde. Daarbij geldt echter ook dat in veel van zijn werk filosofie, theologie, literatuur en fictie niet scherp te scheiden zijn.

In 1936 publiceerde Lewis zijn baanbrekende The Allegory of Love. Lewis beschrijft in dit boek hoe in de vroege middeleeuwen de klassieke goden in allegorische vorm weer het christelijk denken binnenkomen. Streden de goden vroeger tegen elkaar, nu worden het personificaties van krachten in de mens zelf. In de loop van de eeuwen begint de kracht van de allegorie echter te verzwakken. Dit wordt veroorzaakt door het verzwakkende besef dat de stoffelijke wereld primair een afspiegeling is van de bovennatuur. Steeds meer gaan elementen als satire, alledaagsheid en liefdesperikelen overheersen en daarmee verdwijnt de kracht van de allegorie in de westerse literatuur. Een ander levenswerk op het gebied van de literatuurgeschiedenis was zijn English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954) dat als deel III verscheen van The Oxford History of English Literature.

In zijn zeven kinderboeken (The Chronicles of Narmia) en drie science fiction romans verwerkte Lewis ook tal van theologische en filosofische ideeën. Zo vindt men in de roman That Hideous Strength talloze ideeën in literaire vorm die men in The Abolition of Man (1943) in filosofische vorm uitgewerkt vindt. Zijn beroemdste literaire werk is ongetwijfeld het al eerder genoemde The Screwtape Letters. In dit boek schrijft een oudere duivel eenendertig brieven aan een jongere collega met talloze adviezen hoe een jonge gelovige het best verleid kan worden. Het boek weerspreekt het binnen de hedendaagse Nederlandse intelligentsia wijd verbreide vooroordeel dat christendom en humor elkaar niet verdragen.

C.S. Lewis vormde de belichaming van een natuurlijk soort conservatisme. In zijn levensstijl (zo weigerde hij pubs te betreden waar de radio aan stond), in zijn literaire opvattingen (pas heel laat kwam hij tot waardering voor het werk van T.S. Eliot) en in zijn politieke opvattingen was Lewis een conservatief pur sang. Voor wat betreft de politiek moet daarbij wel vermeld worden dat Lewis een groot scepticus was ten aanzien van politici en partijpolitiek. Winston Churchill bewonderde hij overigens zeer, maar dat verhinderde hem in 1951 niet de minister-president te laten weten dat hij afzag van een hem aangeboden titel. Lewis was bang dat zijn critici zo'n adellijke titel als bewijs zouden opvatten dat zijn religieus werk slechts verholen anti-progressieve propaganda was. Zijn onverschilligheid inzake de dagelijkse politiek weerhield hem er niet van over een breed scala aan politieke onderwerpen te schrijven: misdaad, censuur, pacifisme, doodstraf, dienstplicht, vivisectie enzovoorts. Ook over de verzorgingsstaat had hij uitgesproken opvattingen. In een artikel in The Observer schreef hij in 1958:

"The modern State exists not to protect our rights, but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business."

De staat kan ervoor zorgen dat mensen zich gedragen, maar uiteindelijk kan hij de mens niet goed maken. Deugd veronderstelt vrije keuze. Lewis was er vooral bang voor dat de verzorgingsstaat zich verder zou ontwikkelen tot een technocratie van het soort dat hij al in romanvorm had beschreven in That Hideous Strength.

Veel conservatieven zien in The Abolition of Man zijn belangrijkste filosofische werk. In dit werk geeft Lewis een zeer originele verdediging van de natuurrechtsleer. De meeste beschavingen, religies en denksystemen gingen in het verleden van dezelfde morele codex uit. Wanneer men die codex analyseert komt men vanzelf uit bij de bekende deugden als Rechtvaardigheid, Eerlijkheid, Bramhartigheid en Voorzichtigheid. Hij laat zien wat de consequenties zijn wanneer de moderne cultuur het idee van een objectieve morele orde verwerpt.

Lewis is in Nederland een bekend auteur. Een aantal belangrijke boeken van hem is vertaald en leverbaar.

Literatuur

Er is zoveel over Lewis geschreven dat het hier slechts mogelijk is een bescheiden selectie te geven.

Een mooie biografie werd geschreven door Roger Lancelyn Green en Walter Hooper: C.S. Lewis: A Biography (A Harvest Book).

De biografie Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis van George Sayer werd ook in het Nederlands vertaald (Crossway Books).

In de bundel Ontijdige bespiegelingen van Robert Lemm is een korte lezenswaardige inleiding in het werk van Lewis opgenomen (Kok Agora).

Een interessante visie op het conservatieve mens- en geschiedbeeld van Lewis vindt men in het door Peter Kreeft geschreven C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium. Six essays on the Abolition of Man (Ignatius Press).

Een kort essay over de politieke opvatingen van Lewis werd geschreven door John G. West, Jr.: Public Life in the Shadowlands. What C.S. Lewis Teach Us About Politics (Acton Institute), met een geannoteerde bibliografie van de boeken en essays van Lewis die handelen over politieke thema's.

Christopher Isherwood : "Adieu à Berlin"

 

 

Christopher Isherwood: «Adieu à Berlin»

 

 

«Ainsi défilaient les champions de la Révolution. La flambée de passion propice à la réalisation du rêve ardent de sang et de barricades devrait surgir de cette fourmilière noirâtre?» (Ernst von SALOMON).

 

La disparition, voici bientôt dix ans, de l'écrivain anglais Christopher Isherwood, auteur, entre autres nouvelles, d'Adieu à Berlin, nous rappelle qu'il faut aborder différemment la littérature traitant des événements qui ont secoué l'Allemagne de la défaite de 1918 à l'avènement du national-socialisme. Isherwood (1904-1986) a traité cette époque de manière magistrale, surtout la véritable période charnière entre 1929 et 1933, époque où il a vécu en Allemagne et a été témoin direct des bouleversements politiques. L'auteur a observé la reconstitution d'une forme particulière d'engagement politique collectif, propre à l'action de l'ère du nihilisme, due à un surplus de volonté accompagnant la décomposition des hautes sphères de la bourgeoisie et le déclin des valeurs civiques, entraînant la disparition du citoyen traditionnel, pacifique et productif.

 

Adieu à Berlin correspond à ce que Roger Stéphane décrit dans Portrait de l'aventurier comme étant un moment particulier de la culture européenne, où éclot la «désolidarisation d'avec un monde moribond». Ce monde, en effet, produit une “réalité négative et obscure”, où domine un type humain bien cerné par Drieu la Rochelle: «l'homme de main communiste, l'homme citadin, neurasthénique, excité par l'exemple des “fasci” italiens, de même celui des mercenaires des guerres de Chine, des soldats de la Légion Etrangère».

 

Malgré la volonté d'Isherwood de se distancier de l'horreur et de la violence d'une guerre civile berlinoise se camouflant derrière une fausse normalité, celle des cabarets, des quartiers riches en marge des masses et des hôtels de maître hors de la réalité violente de la rue, sa narration se transforme en une chronique de la révolte aveugle et désespérée, celles des hommes qui diront plus tard: «nous connaissions ce que nous aimions et nous n'aimions pas ce que nous connaissions» (propos rapportés par Ernst von Salomon).

 

L'importance d'Isherwood réside au fond en ceci: il est curieux d'une époque et d'une atmosphère, il s'en fait donc le chroniqueur et l'historien et, par l'excellence littéraire de son récit, il nous offre un accès aisé à cette trame d'événements qui ont fait les “années décisives” comme les a appelées Spengler. Vue sous cet angle, l'œuvre de l'écrivain anglais, devenu par après citoyen américain, n'est pas seule: sur le plan narratif, nous avons la nouvelle autobiographique d'Ernst von Salomon, Les Réprouvés;  sur un plan plus philosophique, nous avons les Considérations d'un apolitique de Thomas Mann, réflexions, hésitations d'un intellectuel qui est organiquement un citadin et un bourgeois et qui jette son regard sur ce que sont devenues les valeurs des Lumières.

 

Adieu à Berlin  est donc l'adieu à une époque qui se termine, à ces illusions bourgeoises qui prétendent que “plus rien ne doit se passer”. Adieu à Berlin nous restitue le cadre d'une réalité, nous livre la chronique d'une histoire complexe qui est aussi la récapitulation en condensé d'un large pan de l'histoire européenne contenu tout entier dans les années qui ont immédiatement suivi la défaite allemande de 1918. Dans Les Réprouvés  de von Salomon, on trouve les sédiments de ce qu'expérimentera Isherwood quelques années plus tard. Les thématiques littéraires qui fascineront ou horrifieront l'écrivain anglais étaient déjà nées dans les expériences de ce volontaire des Corps Francs, de ce franc-tireur, de ce terroriste, de cet aventurier, de ce partisan des solutions les plus radicales dans la lutte contre le spartakisme ou contre la République bourgeoise et procédurière de Weimar: Ernst von Salomon.

 

Isherwood décrit les violences des combats de rues à Berlin, la ville conquise par l'habilité propagandiste du Dr. Goebbels et de son journal agressif, dur, caustique et percutant, Der Angriff. «Dans les murs d'un Berlin qui se transformait, apparaissaient, écrites en lourdes lettres gothiques, les affiches de la peste brune. On pouvait y lire: “l'Etat bourgeois approche de sa fin! Il faut forger une nouvelle Allemagne! Elle ne sera ni un Etat bourgeois ni un Etat de classe! Pour réaliser cette mission, l'histoire t'a choisi, toi, le Travailleur manuel et intellectuel!». Pour sa part, von Salomon ne se fait plus aucun illusion, ses espoirs se sont définitivement évanouis: «Le vin qui fermentait dans les tonneaux de la bourgeoisie, sera un jour bu sous la dénomination de “fascisme”».

 

Adieu à Berlin est la mémoire qui nous reste d'une civilisation vieille-bourgeoise, démocratique et pluraliste, perdue au milieu de la marée montant du nihilisme s'annonçant dans l'élan et les ruines, dans un nouveau vitalisme, tel celui que prévoit un personnage du livre, Hinnerk: «Unir les jeunesses communistes et hitlériennes et, avec l'aide de ces bataillons unifiés, envoyer au diable les voleurs de la grosse industrie et de la haute finance, avec leurs appendices, ces ordonnances de merde, et ensuite établir, comme loi suprême, comme unique loi décente, la camaraderie (...) Et tu pourras appeler cela socialisme ou nationalisme, cela m'est absolument égal».

 

Sur les décombres et les différences, Christopher Isherwood salue un écrivain allemand, dont l'idiosyncrasie est foncièrement différente de la sienne, mais dont le constat est pareil au sien: une époque entrait, à Berlin, dans ces années décisives, en extinction.

 

José Luis ONTIVEROS.

(Trad. franç.: Rogelio PETE).