D. H. Lawrence's Manichean Discourse or Janus-like Vision: Dualism vs. Holism E-Book

Mansour Khelifa

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, , course: Modern British Literature, language: English, abstract: In his introduction to Fantasia of the unconscious and psychoanalysis and the unconscious, Lawrence acknowledges that many heterogeneous influences – Eastern philosophies, religions, and mysticisms – have given shape to his intuitive insights and determined his worldview. To peruse the discourse that underlies this vision, it is interesting to submit Lawrence's rhetoric, as it appears in his non-fictional writings (essays, criticisms, theories, etc.), to a 'structuralist poetic' scrutiny and expose the intrinsic mechanics of his discourse to a deeper ‘post-structuralist’, de-consrtructivist reading. For Jonathan Culler, no matter the positioning of the reader, it is almost always inescapable for him or her not to grapple with a close reading of the text: “Whatever critical affiliations we may proclaim, we are all New Critics, in that it requires a strenuous effort to escape notions of the autonomy of the literary work, the importance of demonstrating its unity, and the requirement of ‘close reading’”.

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Inhalt

Abstract

Sample analysis based a selection of 3 quotations

Holistic/holy reality (life transcending and defeating death)

Appendices: Main quotations from D. H. Lawrence's "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" in his book Selected Essays:

Supplementary quotations

Works Cited

Abstract

In his introduction to Fantasia of the unconscious and psychoanalysis and the unconscious, Lawrence acknowledges that many heterogeneous influences – Eastern philosophies, religions, and mysticisms – have given shape to his intuitive insights and determined his worldview. To peruse the discourse that underlies this vision, it is interesting to submit Lawrence's rhetoric, as it appears in his non-fictional writings (essays, criticisms, theories, etc.), to a 'structuralist poetic' scrutiny and expose the intrinsic mechanics of his discourse to a deeper ‘post-structuralist’, de-consrtructivist reading. For Jonathan Culler, no matter the positioning of the reader, it is almost always inescapable for him or her not to grapple with a close reading of the text: “Whatever critical affiliations we may proclaim, we are all New Critics, in that it requires a strenuous effort to escape notions of the autonomy of the literary work, the importance of demonstrating its unity, and the requirement of ‘close reading’” (The Pursuit of Signs 3).

Keywords

Polarities, Manichean, Discourse, Isotopy, Seme, Classeme, Holism, Dualism.

D. H. Lawrence's Manichean Discourse

 or Janus-like Vision: Dualism vs. Holism

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past as it will modify the future.

J L Borges, Labyrinths (qtd. in The Novel Today 70)

In what follows, I will necessarily draw on some specific linguistic and structuralist concepts expounded by Saussure, Jakobson, Greimas, Barthes, Culler, (langage and parole, paradigm and syntagm, synchronicity and diachronicity, metonymy and metaphor). To borrow Greimas's phrase, opposing "isotopies" seem to structure Lawrence's discourse; a typically Lawrentian discourse that hinges on a number of recurrent polarities such as 'life' and 'death', 'male' and 'female', 'light' and 'darkness', 'sun' and 'moon', 'mental consciousness' and 'blood consciousness', 'society' and 'individuality', ‘other’ and ‘self’, etc.

However, this simple/simplistic Manichean discourse seems to be fraught with paradoxes, raising thus inevitable controversies and complexities. The reader may definitely object to Lawrence's obsession with a didactic effort at foregrounding a Manichean, mechanistic, polarized, and at times, reductive worldview. To counter such a critique and substantiate a 'holistic' argument instead, Lawrence intimates that a harmonizing reality, or what he calls a 'third thing' or the 'Holy Spirit', lurks behind the world's dualistic nature. Hence a more satisfying vision appears to be grounded in Lawrence's perception of an ultimate 'organic whole', or an 'essence', or again, a 'holistic truth' that pulls together the atomized dualisms of reality, and that reconstructs a 'perfect relationship' between polarized opposites.

The main purpose of my paper rests on the assumption that above and beyond Lawrence's Manichean discourse there lies "wholeness" or "holiness." In his metaphoric and metonymic grammar, may be suggested what Culler describes as "a poetics" of reading: "Rather than a criticism which discovers or assigns meanings, it would be a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning" (Structuralist Poeticsviii).

The intriguing opposition between life and death has ever and anon amazed and stimulated the imagination of poets, prophets, philosophers, politicians, and common people. De facto man is placed in such a Manichean world which appears to be the sum total of antagonistic binary realities and manifestations: good vs. evil, light vs. dark, pleasure vs. pain, Heaven vs. Hell, God vs. Satan, etc. Every civilization has, in its own peculiar way, tried to define these notions and has in turn been transformed or defined by the way it chose to deal with such notions. Different cultures have addressed such existential problems differently; that is, in terms of religion vs. magic, science vs. art, rationality vs. irrationality. The 'sociology of art' is replete with irreconcilable opposing figures. Life chanters and death mourners: lively artists have danced and sung their life away, and morbid artists heralded imminent doomsday and bemoaned eternal misery. Where some behold the bright side of life others only see the dark one; but to be interested in one side doesn't preclude the interest in the other. Another class of artists chose, as their subject matter, the dualistic aspect of life. Noticeable among these are D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and many others whose art is to a various degree the representation of antithetic themes such as life and death, male and female, reason and madness, present and past, fiction and reality. Conversely, others like Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot, and many more, tend to represent the morbid aspect of life, albeit marvellously. Lawrence's vision, however, since my topic is Lawrence, appears to have more life to it even when compared with the art of his contemporary Woolf and Joyce, for instance.

Undisputedly, Lawrence, as a modernist writer who is ranked on a par with Woolf and Joyce, stands at a crossroads of the evolution of British literature and culture. He embodies the continuation of the canonical 'great tradition', and epitomizes the rejuvenation of modern artistic creation (F. R. Leavis). He is at once versed in botany and in art; and maybe his love for "birds, beasts, and flowers" turned him into a poet. Or was it the other way around? That is, perhaps, because he was essentially a poet he came to love nature and life. His writing is as much the outcome of living experience and "felt life" as that of intellectual learning. The scope of his texts encompasses the familiar and the uncanny; his stories represent typical English character and setting as well as outlandish people and places. Besides, he is the rebellious son of a lively miner and the timid fourth child of a spiritual mother.

D. H. Lawrence, one realizes, was born under the sign of many a paradox. Objective and subjective factors partook in the crystallization of his dichotomous perception of reality, or what I may term a "Janus-like" vision. Lawrence dwelt on this paradoxical worldview and instilled it in the very heart of his oeuvre. In order for me to study this Lawrentian dualistic perception, I will primarily use a selection of samples from his non-fictional work called Selected Essays; essays that were mostly written over the last five years or so of his life (roughly from 1925 to 1930). Afterwards, I will look into the rounding off of this duality, post-structurally, so to speak.

To start with, I will engage in the following pages a structural/semiotic analysis of these samples, hoping to show that certain basic polarized "semes" ("minimal semantic features […] which are the result of oppositions (masculine/feminine, old/young, human/animal)" (Culler 77), and "classemes," (repeated semes which "are largely responsible for the coherence of texts)" (79), and "isotopies" ("a level of coherence" produced by the "repetition of classemes" (79) occur and recur in Lawrence's writing significantly and repeatedly enough to the point of imparting his discourse a Manichean bent, which may determine a given semantic level. At this juncture, Greimas will be quoted at length so as to make clear the linguistic tools I shall use in my analysis:

Such a conception of classemes, as items whose characteristic is to be repeated, can have definite explanatory value [… regarding] the concept of meaningful whole (totalité de signification) … We shall attempt to show, by the use of the concept of isotopy, how it is that

whole texts are situated at homogeneous semantic levels, how the global meaning of a set of signifiers, instead of being postulated a priori, can be interpreted as a real structural property of linguistic manifestation. (qtd. in Culler 80)

For simplicity's sake, I will center my analysis upon the semes of "life" and "death" as they seem to encapsulate Lawrence's other paradoxical "semantic aspects," structure his dualistic discourse, and ground his rhetoric in an idiosyncratic isotopy. Indeed, these central semes (life and death) can be subdivided into various other polarities of equivalent value within the overall structure of Lawrence's rhetoric. In the author's parlance, life-enhancing forces range from the Sun to the Phallus. Death is symbolized by the Moon and "sex in the head" as he writes in Fantasia of the Unconscious. More often than not, he uses a special taxonomy to discriminate between the representations of life and death. And by trying to overpass the trap of tautology, he resorts to some arcane esotericism, which further complicates his language and style. For example, life is represented by the natural elements, by what he calls "blood-consciousness," by southern countries, warmth, flowers, and birds, etc.; in short, everything spontaneous and dynamic is at one with the living cosmos in which "higher" and "lower" orders of life are manifested. Conversely, death is embodied by northern countries, the cold, and sea water, by what he calls "mental consciousness." In other words, everything static and deprived of spontaneity, resisting life and change, is equated with death and decay.

Sample analysis based a selection of 3 quotations

In "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" (53 – 72), one of the essays in part I of Selected Essays called "Love and Life," Lawrence reveals his inner debate and heavy conscience after killing a porcupine that has strayed into his private ranch at night and disrupted the tranquillity of 'Madame', his wife Frieda Von Richthofen. The whole event sounds like a sublimated 'cas de conscience' the narration of which digresses into a sort of philosophic pamphleteering and theorization about life and death. Indeed, after admitting that mysterious unknowable quantity, we call life, and adopting a strategy of self-righteous justification for having slaughtered in cold blood the poor porcupine, Lawrence launches in a long extrapolation about the antagonistic orders of life and the notion of the "survival of the fittest" (64). He asserts, while trying to expatiate on, what he calls "the inexorable law of life" (66). I quote:

1. Any creature that attains to its own fullness of being, its own living self, becomes unique, a nonpareil. It has its place in the fourth dimension, the heaven of existence, and there it is perfect, it is beyond comparison. (emphasis added 66)

The lexeme "life" is explicitly introduced through the use of the phrase "living self." The text foregrounds an italicized "living" while it elides the polarized lexeme "death" which it passes over in silence. The seme "death" is present implicitly through absence. Corollaries of the seme "life" abound and can be identified as "fullness," "being," "unique," "fourth dimension," "heaven," and "perfect," which form a homogeneous classeme indicating an "abstract evidence or truism." The accumulation of such semes strives to create a sense of positivity. This positivity is polarized with the seme of "death" which may be inferred through a negative conversion of the above statement which can be paraphrased or "naturalized" (Culler) as follows: All creatures that do not attain to their fullness of being, their own living selves, cannot become "unique" or "perfect;" they remain irremediably part of an undifferentiated multitude; and "the heaven of existence" may not be their final abode. Unable to achieve full individuation, they exist interchangeably, not in the fourth dimension (blissful transcendence) but in the sublunary world (wretched immanence). Then, they die as if they never existed. In this case, a sense of negativity is implied in an obverse manner. Lawrence goes on to write:

2. At the same time, every creature exists in time and space. And in time and space it exists relatively to all other existence, and can never be absolved. Its existence impinges on other existences, and is itself impinged upon. And in the struggle for existence, if an effort on the part of any one type or species or order of life, can finally destroy the other species, then the destroyer is of a more vital cycle of existence than the one destroyed. (When speaking of existence we always speak in types, species, not individuals. Species exist. But even an individual dandelion has being). (emphasis added 66)

In this passage, the lexeme "existence" functions as the central "seme," and is pitted against "being." The classeme developed in relation with the conditions of "existence" is made up of the following semes: "time," "space," struggle," "effort," "destroyer," "destroyed," "types," "species," and "orders of life." The discursive strategy adopted here strives to heighten the central "seme" (existence) while marginalizing the polarized seme ("being") which occupies the peripheral space of a concluding parenthetical remark. This seme must nonetheless have a special semantic value since it is italicized.

 A brief paraphrase of Lawrence's statement would give this: Creatures suffer from the double bind of time and space and of one another. In the realm of existence the struggle between high and low orders of life goes on, which causes some to destroy others. Under such conditions all creatures are placed not in "the heaven of existence" but in "the hell of subsistence." Individuals escape this generic law of types, species, and classes. Existence is implicitly polarized with being. Hence, the classeme, developed in this statement, contrarily to the one in paragraph 1, establishes a sense of negativity.

In the above examples, in paragraphs 1&2, we have seen how Lawrence's text develops, and is developed or patterned by antithetical semes; life as opposed to death and existence as polarized with being. This double polarization is often merely implied; the selection of an adequately collocating classeme may guide the reader to pinpoint and find out about the unstated opposites. For example in paragraph 1, life is overrated at the expense of death; and in paragraph 2, the reverse occurs, that is, existence is overstated whereas being is understated. These examples indicate clearly the dualistic structure of Lawrence's discourse. A discursive structure that allows for the free interplay between various clusters of antonymous signifiers: life vs. death, being vs. existence, positivity vs. negativity, etc.

However satisfying the Manichean interpretation of Lawrence's discourse may have been (so far) in the preceding demonstration, it nonetheless represents one partial component of Lawrence's whole or holistic rhetoric. As a matter of fact, the claim that the Lawrentian discourse has a Manichean, dualistic structured must not be mistaken for the more complex vision of the artist, which strives to encompass an essentialist metaphysic. Such an interpretation is justified as a surface structure of Lawrence's discourse, which falls short of the deep complexity of Lawrence's holistic rhetoric and worldview.

Indeed, even though, Lawrence claims that "All existence is dual" (67), he does not subscribe to the reductive tautology that 'life is life' or to the truism that 'life is the opposite of death'. Neither would we contentedly accept this partial Janus-like vision of his. Lawrence explicitly seeks a globalizing, synthetic view placed above and beyond Manichean binary oppositions.

Holistic/holy reality (life transcending and defeating death)

Lawrence introduces a third entity into this entropic duality astraddle between what he calls "creation" and "chaos." In the same essay, he uses the metaphor/fable of the dandelion as an illustration of his dualistic/holistic argument by dramatizing a triangular relationship between "The Holy Ghost," "Life," and "Death." He writes:

3. All existence is dual, and surging towards a consummation into being. In the seed of the dandelion, as it floats with its little umbrella of hairs, sits the Holy Ghost in tiny compass. The Holy Ghost is that which holdsthe light and the dark, the day and the night, the wet and the sunny, united in one little clue. There it sits in the seed of the dandelion. (emphasis added 67)

These statements bring to bear on two classemes: one relating to duality and another one to oneness. Oneness and duality are not set in opposition (just as the text here does not say with what existence should be polarized); they are rather complementary. The clue (the sign in the Saussurean acceptance) is the synthetic reality derived directly from the consummation of the dualistic existence. This "clue" (or this sign) forms the underlying isotopy of Lawrence's discourse. This central isotopy is the self or rather the experiences through which the self passes. To use Greimas's terms, this structuring isotopy (the experience of the self) imparts Lawrence's rhetoric a peculiar "level(s) of semantic coherence". The experience of the self, in Lawrence's view, is allotropic (that is multilayered and homogeneous at the same time, just as “soot and diamond are the same element, which is carbon”). In the first example mentioned above (paragraph 1) the self is represented in its ideal (transcendental) state (self-sufficient and perfect); in the second example (paragraph 2), it is shown in its existential (terrestrial) state ("divided against itself" and dual); and in the third example (paragraph 3), the experience of the self is dramatized in its creative (dialectical) state (dynamic and "exquisitely" balanced).

 What we can finally arrive at is the following: For all its philosophizing and hectoring symbolism, Lawrence's idiosyncratic rhetoric is firmly grounded in what may be accepted as an isotopy of purely deductive logic that endeavours to achieve the integration of opposites: 1/ Posited thesis: There must exist an ideal "living self"; if this is true, then, Antithesis: It cannot be the existential self because it is "dual" and far from being perfect; therefore, inferred Synthesis: To attain to its "fullness of being", the self must be in a creative relationship with the polarized other.

Lawrence has no patience with abstractions and abstract ideals. For him this synthetic "self" is real, it is a living self. In fine, if the hypothesis aforementioned is granted, Lawrence's discourse may then be said to be made up of a surface structure which is a cluster of Manichean polarities, and a deep structure which dramatizes a holistic and/or holy and mystical conception of life. The Lawrentian discourse derives its legitimacy form a revisited Trinitarian Christian cosmogony; that is, God the Father who is in Heaven, Jesus Christ who is the incarnation of God's Word, and the Holy Ghost who is the inspirational Spirit and perfecting synthesizer "It."

Appendices: Main quotations from D. H. Lawrence's "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" in his book Selected Essays:

1. "Any creature that attains to its own fullness of being, its own living self, becomes unique, a nonpareil. It has its place in the fourth dimension, the heaven of existence, and there it is perfect, it is beyond comparison" (emphasis added 66).

2. "At the same time, every creature exists in time and space. And in time and space it exists relatively to all other existence, and can never be absolved. Its existence impinges on other existences, and is itself impinged upon. And in the struggle for existence, if an effort on the part of any one type or species or order of life, can finally destroy the other species, then the destroyer is of a more vital cycle of existence than the one destroyed. (When speaking of existence we always speak in types, species, not individuals. Species exist. But even an individual dandelion has being)" (emphasis added 66)."

3. "All existence is dual, and surging towards a consummation into being. In the seed of the dandelion, as it floats with its little umbrella of hairs, sits the Holy Ghost in tiny compass. The Holy Ghost is that which holdsthe light and the dark, the day and the night, the wet and the sunny, united in one little clue. There it sits in the seed of the dandelion" (emphasis added 67).

Supplementary quotations

"The seed falls to earth. The Holy Ghost rouses, saying: 'Come!' And out of the sky come the rays of the sun and out of the earth comes dampness and dark and the death-stuff. They are called in, like those bidden to a feast. The sun sits down at the hearth, inside the seed; and the dark, damp death-returner sits on the opposite side, with the host between. And the host says to them: 'Come! Be merry together!' So the sun looks with desirous curiosity on the dark face of the earth, and the dark damp one looks with wonder on the bright face of the other, who comes from the sun. And the host says: 'Here you are at home! Lift me up, between you, that I may cease to be a Ghost. For it longs me to look out, it longs me to dance with the dancers'” (67).

Quotations from D. H. Lawrence's "Whistling of Birds" in his book Selected Essays:

 “The long, frosty, and deadly winter is over: "The blackbird cannot stop his song […] In his song is heard the first brokenness and uncertainty of the transition. The transit from the grip of death into new being is a death from death, in its sheer metempsychosis, a dizzy agony. But only for a second, the moment of trajectory, the passage from one state to the other, from the grip of death to the liberty of newness. In a moment he is a kingdom of wonder, singing at the centre of a new creation.

The bird did not hang back. He did not cling to his death and his dead. There is no death, and the dead have buried their dead" (112).

Works Cited

Primary sources

Lawrence, David Herbert. Selected Essays. London: Penguin Books, 1974. Print.

---. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the

 Unconscious. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

---. Selected Letters. Introduction by Aldous Huxley. London:

 Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

---. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Penguin

 Books, 1977. Print.

---.Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers. New York: The Viking

 Press, 1970. Print.

---. D. H. Lawrence on Education. Eds. Joy and Raymond

 Williams. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973. Print.

Secondary sources

Becket, Fiona. The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. London:

Routledge, 2002. Print.

Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. Introduction to Literature,