nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
sturm und drang
While I sympathize with Lawrence's abhorrence of modernity and its valorization of abstraction above all else, I'm not sure that it makes sense to conceive of the metaphorical head as other-than-erogenous, somehow fragmented from the natural world that the loins inhabit. I would tend to consider the head a most vital part to the body's erotic whole, being its CPU, the unit into which all sensation, every bit of sensory information, flows to be processed, routed, and disseminated. (Even orgasms take shape in the brain, and culminate in a literal shutting down of function, a going-black and a near-total release second only to death…) Lawrence's failure to forestall his own lapse into a dualistic vitalism, to avoid what vitalists despise most, the notion that humans reside in the crevasse of a fundamental split in the natural order, was symptomatic of the contemporary modernist-humanist belief that homo sapiens were the centralmost being in the universe (destined to concur, subdue, and transcend nature via the powers of the mind)-- though Lawrence's own afflication with humanistic dualism apparently remained unfelt by him, in his being-thrown-into-modernity.
Here lies another point at which I diverge from Freud and (by extension) Lawrence: the notion of sublimation. For Freud all artwork, i.e. any abstractly human output, becomes just a placeholder for excess erotic energy that can find no other (physical, psychological) outlet. In this erotic universe, all desire is suspended by and rotates centripetally around phallic lack. This void becomes the central figure, hangs like our Sun gravitationally pulling everything toward it, in the Freudian developmental model of unfolding narrative selfhood, founded in the Ego, wherein the earliest events always overdetermine the remainder of the process. Each self, in order to become "civilized" performs on an Oedipal stage, in the theater of neurotic familial dependencies, for the benefit of an always absent but pressingly felt audience of others (society). All post-Oedipal erotic attachments can only be mere shadows of realer, more elemental relations-- the need for the body of the mother, the rival-father’s annoying presence, the sibling's absolute alterity. Eventually, children become parents and the play can be restaged. Generation after generation.
In The Rainbow, male characters are unable to erotically relate to their female counterparts in a non-neurotic fashion. Women are an unknowable abyss, both feared for their mysterious connection to the earth and revered for their sacral ties to the forces of nature. People on the most basic level of animal selfhood are mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. These roles are the inexorable lot of humanity due to deep, dark, elemental forces that drive men (provide, protect, possess) and women (nurture, envelope, yield). Love itself is a moody, volatile set of dipolar intensities that as easily lowers lovers to blind rage and knawing jealousy as it elevates them to ecstasy and enlightenment. The destabilizing of the family and penetration of the rural landscape by technology, insofar as this tears people away from nature's elemental forces, is the ultimate horror for Lawrence. Without nature to ground them in their animal selfhood, his characters (especially the females) lose sight of their own happiness and satisfaction entirely.
Read as a reaction to Victorian hysteria about the body and its functions, and the enchroachment of industrialization and globalization on the natural order, Lawrence's work still resonates quite deeply today in the era of ecological crisis. He can take credit for very clearly perceiving the impending doom that the rise of unprecendently large and powerful machinic assemblages presaged. I wonder if it's perhaps very uncommon, the ability Lawrence had to diagnose the malady he himself suffered from deeply.
While I sympathize with Lawrence's abhorrence of modernity and its valorization of abstraction above all else, I'm not sure that it makes sense to conceive of the metaphorical head as other-than-erogenous, somehow fragmented from the natural world that the loins inhabit. I would tend to consider the head a most vital part to the body's erotic whole, being its CPU, the unit into which all sensation, every bit of sensory information, flows to be processed, routed, and disseminated. (Even orgasms take shape in the brain, and culminate in a literal shutting down of function, a going-black and a near-total release second only to death…) Lawrence's failure to forestall his own lapse into a dualistic vitalism, to avoid what vitalists despise most, the notion that humans reside in the crevasse of a fundamental split in the natural order, was symptomatic of the contemporary modernist-humanist belief that homo sapiens were the centralmost being in the universe (destined to concur, subdue, and transcend nature via the powers of the mind)-- though Lawrence's own afflication with humanistic dualism apparently remained unfelt by him, in his being-thrown-into-modernity.
Here lies another point at which I diverge from Freud and (by extension) Lawrence: the notion of sublimation. For Freud all artwork, i.e. any abstractly human output, becomes just a placeholder for excess erotic energy that can find no other (physical, psychological) outlet. In this erotic universe, all desire is suspended by and rotates centripetally around phallic lack. This void becomes the central figure, hangs like our Sun gravitationally pulling everything toward it, in the Freudian developmental model of unfolding narrative selfhood, founded in the Ego, wherein the earliest events always overdetermine the remainder of the process. Each self, in order to become "civilized" performs on an Oedipal stage, in the theater of neurotic familial dependencies, for the benefit of an always absent but pressingly felt audience of others (society). All post-Oedipal erotic attachments can only be mere shadows of realer, more elemental relations-- the need for the body of the mother, the rival-father’s annoying presence, the sibling's absolute alterity. Eventually, children become parents and the play can be restaged. Generation after generation.
In The Rainbow, male characters are unable to erotically relate to their female counterparts in a non-neurotic fashion. Women are an unknowable abyss, both feared for their mysterious connection to the earth and revered for their sacral ties to the forces of nature. People on the most basic level of animal selfhood are mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. These roles are the inexorable lot of humanity due to deep, dark, elemental forces that drive men (provide, protect, possess) and women (nurture, envelope, yield). Love itself is a moody, volatile set of dipolar intensities that as easily lowers lovers to blind rage and knawing jealousy as it elevates them to ecstasy and enlightenment. The destabilizing of the family and penetration of the rural landscape by technology, insofar as this tears people away from nature's elemental forces, is the ultimate horror for Lawrence. Without nature to ground them in their animal selfhood, his characters (especially the females) lose sight of their own happiness and satisfaction entirely.
Read as a reaction to Victorian hysteria about the body and its functions, and the enchroachment of industrialization and globalization on the natural order, Lawrence's work still resonates quite deeply today in the era of ecological crisis. He can take credit for very clearly perceiving the impending doom that the rise of unprecendently large and powerful machinic assemblages presaged. I wonder if it's perhaps very uncommon, the ability Lawrence had to diagnose the malady he himself suffered from deeply.
