Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

D.H. Lawrence and his Mystique of Dual

Dr. V. Rama Murthy

D.H. Lawrence and his Mystique of Dual Consciousness

“Nowadays men do hate the idea of dualism. It is no good, dual we are. The cross.”

D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature was published in 1923. It preceded the publication of Lady Chatterly’s Lover at least by five years. A reading of some parts of the Studies gives us a feeling that Lawrence had a mystique of his own which he later associated with his fictional work. Moreover, the Studies reveals more of Lawrence than of the American classics and being subjective and impressionistic his criticism is a class of creative writing by itself. As seen from the Studies his ideas and con­victions on man’s freedom, doom of the white man, master and servant relationship, man’s divided psyche form part of his mystique and these appear often as more inherent in him than in the writers he examines. His ideas have a consistent unity and, strike us as theories or postulates on life. My object in this paper is to explore one of his most important postulates, that is, what he calls the dual consciousness.

According to Lawrence, all life-interchange is a polarized com­munication. It is a circuit with positive and negative polarity. Even master and servant relationship is essentially a polarized flow, like love. It is a circuit of vitalism. Such a relationship as this cannot be reduced to any idea or abstraction. “Once you abstract both master and servant and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency and so on......then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine man......”1 To Lawrence, this master-servant relationship, when reduced to an idea, mangles the blood-reciprocity of master and servant and results in an abstract horrror. It is a natural relationship and once abstract idealism enters into the identities of master and servant the vitality of the relationship is irreparably damaged. Law­rence even approves of the master beating his servant as that in­volves what he calls “passional justice”. A court decision in such cases could only be mechanical justice. In such a direct action the “physical intelligence” of the servant is restored. There is no use of approaching him through the mind, the reason and the spirit, This is a natural form of “human coition”.2 Lawrence does not seem to be feudalistic in his attitude towards servant. What he seems to look for is a warm human, concrete and vital relationship. For instance, a teacher caning a student established a closer and warmer relationship with the student than when he gets himpunished through a remote administrative process.

There is a male and female circuit. Love forms the mystic conjunction between the two. But each soul–male and female­–has its own identity. Any merging between the two leads to disaster and death. “The soul’s deepest will is to preserve its own integrity”, he says.3 He admires Whitman’s poetry for its vitality but ridicules the poet’s generalizations and identifications. When Whitman says “I am he that aches with amorous love”, Lawrence discovers the poet’s individuality leaking out of him. Whitman as well might have said: The femaleness aches for my maleness.4 Lawrence hates generalizations in a master that is biological. By attacking Whitman, he is actually attacking all types of monism.

To Lawrence each soul has a substantial unity of its own. “The central law of all organic life is that each organism is in­stinctively isolate and single in itself”, he says.5 All merging therefore is a death process. He believed in “That I am I” or that A is A. But this I is a dark forest. One has perception of only a small part of it. “That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest”.6 He also said: “Gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go . When the gods come do what they bid you do”.7

The soul is perceptive, unique and self-enclosed, to Lawrence. However, he becomes obscurantist when he associates it with the Holy Ghost. “Lose no time with ideals,” he says, “serve the Holy Ghost; Never serve mankind.”8 He is unable to extricate himself from the Christian idiom, although his theory is a personal one. Frequently he also associates the soul with the psychological IT (id). One should according to him, seek “what IT wishes done”. 9 IT is the deepest self and men are free only when they act according to the dictates of IT. IT is the primary urge. It is central to the self. Alongside IT there is, however, a secondary urge, and that is, each individual organism longs to come into intimate contact with fellow organisms and become vivified. But thisunison with fellow organisms is only a temporary thing because in ultimate terms each organism is isolate in itself and must return to its own isolation.10 This is a “contact only upto a certain point”. This leads him to another postulate: There is a limit to everything; there is a limit to love.11 Lawrence seems to differ from Keats to whom love is an intense experience which leads one into fellowship with essence or the divine. While intensifying his experience of beauty or love, Keats attains the joy of disembodied existence (“till we shine full alchemized and free of space”). To him love and death are like experiences.12 Lawrence keeps love and death distinct and separate: “Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together, closer, closer together. For this reason sex is the actual crisis of love. For in sex the blood systems, in the male and female, concentrate and come into contact, the nearest film intervening, yet if the intervening film breaks down, it is death”.13 Love, therefore, has its limits although Lawrence allows for some balanced excess.

Lawrence warns that to try to knowa person one loves, is to kill her/him: “Every sacred instinct teaches that one must leave her unknown. You know your woman darkly in the blood. To try to know her mentally is to try to kill her. Beware, O woman, of the man who wants to find out what you are. And, oh men, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to knowyou, or getyou what you are”.14 Lawrence believed that God Almighty “kicked” Adam and Eve out of the garden because they wanted “not doing it but knowing about it.” Their self-consciousness made them ashamed of the act. God found them degenerating into “dirty hypocrites” 15 So they were kicked out. To Lawrence the physical or manual work is as dignified as the intellectual. He cannot bear to see anyone disliking work like washing dishes or sweeping the floor. Brook farming is more important than book farming. In his own personal life he had to face the stark tragedy of his mother hating manual labour and his father hating the sight of books or of anyone reading books.

According to Lawrence man is made of a dual consciousness of which the two halves are most of the time in opposition to one another. The dual consciousness comprises blood consciousness and mind consciousness. Blood consciousness overwhelms, obliterates and annuls mind consciousness. Mind consciousness extinguishes blood consciousness and consumes the blood. “We are all of us” he says, “conscious is both ways. And the two are antagonistic in us. They will remain so. That is our cross”. 16 It is not clear whether Lawrence is attacking the Socratic dictum “know thyself”. It is also possible that underneath his antagonism to knowing there is the Genesis folktale of the forbidden fruit. He considers knowledge and belief to be opposite antagonistic States. “The more we know, the less we are. The more we are the less we know l7 : Aristotle, Leibnitz, Bradley and Russell have expressed differing views on cognition or knowing. An object has a holistic character in which the being is greater than some of its parts. For instance, sugar is not mere whiteness, mere hardness, and mere sweetness.

Its reality lies somehow in its unity. But on the other hand, what there can be in the thing beside these qualities will baffle us.

Lawrence is one of those who brought about a sexual revolu­tion in the West. His Lady Chatterly’s Lover has been hailed as a “quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman”.18 The passage which describes Lady Jane’s first reaction to Connie’s nakedness is hailed as “a revelation of the sacrament itself, is properly the novel’s very holy of holies....transfiguration scene with atmospheric clouds and lightning, and a pentecoastal sun bean illumination the ascension of the deity “thick and arching” before the reverent eyes of the faithful....Constance Chatterly is granted the sight of godhead, which turns out to be a portrait of the creator himself, nude, and in his impressive state”.19 Connie moaning with “bliss” is its “sacrifice” and a “new born thing” . The formula is rather simple: “You meet her, cheat her into letting you have a piece of and then take off. Mellor’s hunt is a primitive find, fuck and forget”. 20

Kate Millet makes a prelapsarian Adam out of Connie. But like Lawrence she calls sex act a kind of sacrifice. Lawrence con­sidered venery as of the great gods. “It is an offering-up of yourself to the great gods.” 21 From this one can see that Lawrence himself is unable to reconcile his divided psyche. He intends to treat the sex act as something purely physical but at the same time he invests it with some religious mystery.

Psychologists refuse to view sex within the narrow confines of a reproductive act. According to P.D. Ouspensky: “Of all ordinary human experiences only sex sensations approach those which we may call the mystical state of ecstasy. Nothing else in our life brings us so near to the limits of human possibilities beyond which begin the unknown...” 22 Now, is sex act a mystical union, an integrative process, a reproductive activity or a mere physical urge? The coming together of Connie and Mellors is actually a coming together of mind and body. It cannot be a coming together of mindless animals although the emphasis is on the physical side. It is a celebration or festival of sex. At the hands of a novelist like Henry Miller it may become a heartless cycle. Between Conme and Mellors there is tenderness, there is feeling and there is polarized energy.

In Lady Chatterly’s Lover Lawrence almost succeeded in dramatizing his mystique of sex. Adultery makes a jarring note but that is not the main point of the story. Lawrence’s interest is in dramatizing the male and female circuit with a thin film in­tervening between the two and preventing any merging between them. He believed that only in this way there could be harmony and completeness in life. “All the talk of young girls and virginity like a blank sheet on which nothing is written, is pure nonsense. A young girl and a young boy is a tormented tangle, a seething con­fusion of sexual feelings and sexual thoughts which only years will disentangle, years of honest thoughts of sex and years of struggling action in sex will bring us at last when we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity, our completeness, when our sexual thought and sexual act are in harmony, and the one does not in­terfere with the other”. 23

REFERENCES

1 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, (The Viking Press, N.Y., 1972) p. 116.
2 Ibid, p. 118.
3 Studies, p. 176.
4 Ibid, p. 170.
5 Ibid, p. 166.
6 Ibid, p. 16.
7 Ibid, p. 17. T.S. Eliot attacks Lawrence, Hardy and others who were after Strange gods in his After Strange Gods.
8 Studies, p. 17.
9 Ibid, p. 6.
10 Ibid, p. 67.
11 Ibid, p. 66.
12 Refer to Bright Star sonnet.
13 Studies, p. 66.
14 Ibid, p. 70.
15 Ibid, p. 85.
16 Studies, p. 85.
17 Ibid, p. 113.
18 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Rupert Hart - Davis, Lundon, 1971) p. 238.  
19 Ibid, p. 235.
20Ibid, p. 296.
21 Studies, p. 18.
22 P.D. Ouspensky, Sex and Society (Frederick Muller,. Ltd., London, 1955) p. 61.
23 D.H. Laerence, Apropos of Lady Chatterly’s Lover’ Sex, Literature, and Censorship ed. by Harvey T. Moore (Hinemann & Co., 1957) p. 226.

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