Notes on the modern period -29 - Apocalypse and the modern imagination

During and after the First World War – with its ten million dead – modern writers contemplated the bearing on their time of the idea of apocalypse, its violent abnegation of life and its apparent rejection of all that is living and whole. The engagement of this idea resulted in part from having witnessed European civilization’s hurling itself into what seemed an abyss of self-destruction. I want to describe the illuminating parallel between two such visions of apocalypse, one by Walter Benjamin in his first book, written in 1925, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and the other by D. H. Lawrence in his last book, written in 1929, Apocalypse. (Here's an Amazon link to the Lawrence: Apocalypse (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.H. Lawrence) .

Walter Benjamin’s book is a study of the German baroque drama, but his argument ranges beyond the nature of baroque tragedy to the idea of “the state of emergency” and the quite modern antithesis between an encompassing “catastrophe” and the “restoration” of life. Lawrence’s book is a study of John of Patmos’ “Book of Revelations” in the New Testament, but his discussion also ranges beyond the Biblical idea of apocalypse to address the crucial modern tension between catastrophe the hope for restoration.

Benjamin describes the baroque yearning for a transcendent order designed to reign in and ultimately negate the vitality of the Renaissance and its restoration of Classical humanism and its “pagan glorification.” In the baroque era, the sought-for metaphysical order aims for a “complete stabilization” of “the worldly and despotic aspects of [the energy intrinsic to] the rich feeling for life characteristic of the Renaissance.” In fear of the recurrence and “restoration” of that “feeling for life,” the baroque develops a conception of the “state of emergency” as the last and terrible means to trap and regulate the vital chaos of life. Similarly, the baroque version of “heaven” becomes an antithetical instrument for fearful purgation and regulation, whereby the “hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world.” (Here's an Amazon link to Benjamin's book: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Radical Thinkers).)

The modern version of the baroque apocalypse connects the eradication of life with the suicidal advances in the mechanization of war (not to mention the soulless mechanization of mass society). Both the baroque’s orderly purgation of life and the rationalized suicide of modern Europe’s wars yield the apocalyptic sensation of living in a world that “is being driven along to a cataract.” This world, headed for the abyss, is “haunted by the idea of catastrophe,” of life being wiped out.

In the baroque period, an elaborate, sometimes grotesque art results; such art “clings closely” to the smallest, most discarded things in life, which exist under the threat of the world’s eradication. As a result, baroque art, rather like modern art, “extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear the way for an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence.” The “violence” of such art zeroes in on any signs of “pagan glorification” and reproduces them even as it distorts these signs of life’s vitality.

That paradox is embedded in the façade of the baroque Mexican cathedral dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, with its unholy mix of Christian and native pagan iconography, just as it is at work in Benjamin’s portrait of the baroque German tragic drama, with its demented sovereigns and its apocalyptic final acts.

When we turn to modern art and literature, we can find a similar paradox whereby the gestures and images of ordinary life are estranged and often beautifully deformed – the nude body or  box of unsmoked Gauloises in a Matisse or Picasso painting, the mud-dripped church or the vacant streets of modern cities in a Gaudi building or an Eliot poem. To an extent, as Carlos Fuentes argues, America itself is a paradoxically baroque construct invented in the seventeenth century, and the modern manifestations of America reproduce – to an exaggerated extreme – the baroque conjunction of puritanism and paganism, of sun-desiccated metaphysics and darkly lush sensuality, of abstract ideals and the earthy vista of freedom.  In modernity as in the baroque, there is an unstable embrace of such contradictions, simultaneously contemplating the wiping away of the things of this world and their distorted “glorification.”

D. H. Lawrence developed a similar conception in his Studies in Classic American Literature (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)  and above all in his last work, Apocalypse. In the former work, America is seen as haunted by the apocalyptic death of the old world and the challenge of creating the new world; for example, in Lawrence’s view of Whitman and Melville, death surrounds the human being who must use his isolated will to transform the bare force of nature and construct himself and his ties to other humans from the encounter. But for our purposes, Lawrence’s last work is most relevant and illuminating.

In Apocalypse, Lawrence identifies the deadly danger of modernity, which impedes the affirmative contact with nature and the resulting potential for self-creation. His description of “The Book of Revelations” parallels Benjamin’s portrait of the baroque, even with regard to the two Christian visions of the state, for in “Revelations,” the worldly operations of the state, let alone of the body, are anathema and must be apocalyptically purged. Yet this “dark side,” this “resistance” to “the things that the human heart secretly yearns after,” is a refusal of “what man most passionately wants…his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of the ‘soul.’” “By the very frenzy with which the Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world, and all kings and all rulers, all scarlet and purple and cinnamon, all harlots, finally all men altogether who are not ‘sealed,’ we can see how deeply the Apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth” and the rest of life.

How can the great rush toward death be stopped? Can human beings restore their sense of life, of vital consciousness, and “what the old Greeks meant by…theos”? In a wonderful passage about the restoration of language itself from his 1929 book, Lawrence again parallels Benjamin, who in “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” asserts that in the act of “naming, the mental being of man communicates itself to God.” (Here is a link to the book containing Benjamin's essay - Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings). Lawrence describes the “old Greek” way of naming the water which overcomes thirst, of naming the cold of the water in one’s mouth, “whatever struck you was god.” If the water was cold “as you touched it: then another god came into being, ‘the cold.’” For Lawrence, the names themselves, the words, are sacramental “things themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things,” they restored human consciousness and imagination to life in a way similar to what Lawrence hoped the language itself of his lyrical and incantatory poetry and fiction would achieve.

Let the language of Lawrence’s own conclusion end this post: “What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.”

Notes on the modern period - 27 - D. H. Lawrence

As a novelist, Lawrence carries on where Thomas Hardy left off in Jude the Obscure. His novels continue and deepen the realist Victorian tradition in fiction (“the great tradition,” as Leavis called it, of moral realism, with its probing portrayals of men and women in society), and he does so in works that also embody modernist daring and experiment. Above all his novels explore levels of subconscious and unconscious motivation, particularly the role of sexuality in his characters’ lives. He renders this daring “primitivist” vision of passion’s role in our lives by means of an experimental novelistic language employing a stylized incantatory lyricism and a structure of repeated images which become abstract signposts of the unconscious. These strategies are joined – for example in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and The Plumed Serpent – with Lawrence’s dark and judgmental vision of the decline of western civilization, so that his readers and characters are made to face the decadence of western culture, often in comparison with African, Mexican, ancient, or folk culture; in this echt modernist strategy, he positions his fiction as an ambitious and censorious critique of civilization.

But what is most compelling in Lawrence’s work is his delving into questions of what makes us human, what drives us at the most primary level. To think about his novels involves our facing – with appropriate trepidation – the deepest level of our own psyche. The primitivism associated with his treatment of sexuality is bracing and disturbing, not least because it is part of his effort to delve into the hidden levels of unconscious motives. His works confront not only any hangover of fastidious Victorian repression; they also expose the efforts to simplify and reduce the deeper workings of our passions through antiseptic detachment and materialist allure or “packaging”[see his late essay “Pornography and Obscenity” - which can be found in any (used) copy of Portable D H Lawrence (Viking Portable Library)]. In a significant early letter to his editor Edward Garnett, he voices his aim to get beyond the portrayal of superficial characteristics of life, the glittering facets of what he calls “diamond,” and to dig beyond the surface to the level of the essential carbon of existence; Lawrence uses as the essential element of his novels just this sort of imagery (like coal and diamond), images which function like quasi-sacramental symbols and rhythmic incantations conveying his elemental insights into the passions which drive human beings, above all sexual passion.

These motifs of style and theme are evident in the story “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” in which a country doctor saves a poverty-stricken woman from suicide by drowning; in his rooms, she has been warmed in towels, and she responds with desperate neediness to his kindness. The souls of these characters are in danger of expiring, hers from despair and his from emptiness; as a result they are on the verge of doing something extreme, struggling confusedly, even grotesquely toward life. Here is a passage in which images as well as the individual words themselves are incanted as a means of summoning up the subconscious knot of feeling operating beyond the surface of the ego: “Her hands were drawing him, drawing him down to her. He was afraid, even a little horrified. For he had, really, no intention of loving her. Yet her hands were drawing him towards her. He put out his hand quickly to steady himself, and grasped her bare shoulder. A lame seemed to burn the hand that grasped her soft shoulder. He had no intention of loving her; his whole will was against his yielding. It was horrible. And yet wonderful was the touch of her shoulders….”  Carbon, not diamond: the “primitive” frankness of the passage points toward the full physical honesty of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which employs the Anglo-Saxon words for sex and excrement.

Diamond versus coal: these are logical images to employ for this son of a coal worker and the brilliant product of the working class miner’s passionate marriage to an ex-teacher from a failing middle-class family.  Lawrence, born in 1885, was raised by the coal mine in the “company town,” and as a gifted student, he was the beneficiary of Gladstone’s Education Act of 1870 (one of several bills which saved England from much of Europe’s revolutionary disturbances). Like Joyce, he was a working class or at least lower-middle-class genius; he came in first in the country-wide King’s Scholarship exam, enabling him to attend the University of Nottingham. He and his closest friend in late adolescence, Jesse Chambers, formed a small group, the Pagans, dedicated to the ideas of Pater, Wagner, and Nietzsche; his first publication was a group of poems Jesse sent to Ford Maddox Ford, editor of The English Review. In 1912, he met Frieda Weekley, wife of his French professor at the university, a German woman who had undergone psychoanalysis; she left her husband for him, and his relationship to her lasted the rest of his life, through travels to Europe, Australia, Mexico, New Mexico and back to Europe. Her influence is to be felt immediately in the Freudian portrait of mother and son in Sons and Lovers, and she contributes features to several heroines in his novels. His life was ever in exile – whether driven into a sort of internal exile by British hypocrisy and hostility, or embracing external exile in his travels and foreign residences, continually searching for a more living community, often with close friends.

An aspect of Lawrence’s ambition is this transformation of his intimate biography into the matter of his fiction, so that the novels cumulatively evoke an encompassing chronicle of his life experience. This is not only a matter of the extraordinary appropriation of himself as a character (akin to the gigantism of self in Joyce’s Stephen or Proust’s Marcel), or of the novels’ chronicle of his world travels, both physical and spiritual – from despair to rebirth. It is also a matter of his appropriation and transformation of the lives of his intimate friends – Jesse Chambers becomes Miriam in Sons and Lovers; Katherine Mansfield becomes Gudrun, and John Middleton Murray becomes Gerald in Women in Love.

I’ll try in my next post further to explore some of the features of Women in Love. [Here are some Amazon links to Lawrence's works: Selected Stories (Lawrence, D. H.) (Penguin Classics), Sons and Lovers (Vintage Classics), The Rainbow (Vintage Classics), Women in Love, Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics)(Vintage Classics).]