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).]

Notes on the Modern Period - 14 - Abstraction and Immediacy in Modern Art

A pattern established itself early in the modern period, joining an appeal to the moment with the pursuit of increasingly abstract form. This apparent paradox was evident even in Pater’s idealism about art’s power to redeem the moment as well as his ambiguity in evoking the simultaneously “hard” form yet constant mutability of the moment “burn[ing] with a hard, gem-like flame.” Particularly modern painters have been fascinated by experiments with abstraction. [All of thepainters or paintings referred to in this post can be viewed on Mark Harmon's site www.artchive.com.]

Among the Post-Impressionists, Cezanne is the most influential example of this melding of immediacy with abstraction, of purely painterly pleasure with an abstract geometry of ovals, squares, and rectangles. There are the beautiful still-lifes of fruit, lush and ripe in the moment, which are simultaneously a collection of clearly delineated circles, or the powerful portraits of Madame Cezanne, presented with intense immediacy and yet emphasizing the geometry of the face as an oval; and there are the wonderful portraits of Mt. St. Victoire or the Bay at Marseilles where Cezanne takes great pleasure in the actual painting of the looming images, as if he has discovered the secret of his imagination: not the rendering of a particular light or place (though Provence was a necessary inspiration for his work), but the delight in form, the play with geometric patterning and the gradations of the paint itself.

There is an evocative aesthetic manifesto written as the introduction to the catalogue for the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London organized by Roger Fry in late 1910 (in response to which Virginia Woolf wrote that “on or about December 1910, human nature changed”). The introduction was written by the literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy, and it rehearses many of the key motifs of modernism and its paradoxical combination of immediacy and abstraction. MacCarthy writes about Cezanne, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, and he speaks of their ability to express the “emotional significance which lies in things;” this capacity has a long Romantic pedigree (Wordsworth thought he drew on it when he wrote that “we see into the life of things”), as does MacCarthy’s understanding of how art struggles to confront conventional habitual thinking (his complement to the Impressionists is that “they have conquered [attention] for future originality,” though his criticism is that they focused on “recording hitherto unrecognized aspects of objects” rather than on rendering the essences and emotional resonances. It was Post-Impressionism which upheld the primacy of the psychic stream of “emotions and associations,” and the impact of this new art was to “shock and disconcert,” to achieve the shock of revealing inner truth and of destabilizing “naturalist” conventions – finally, its negations of expectation provoke a lapsing of the habitual expectations, a sort of death of the blinkered conventional self. [See the essay in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.]

About Post-Impressionist abstraction, MacCarthy emphasizes the tendency in it toward “simplification of planes” and “the extreme simplification” of surfaces, of line and design, all as an effort to promote “the fundamental laws of abstract form.” Our question is, of course, what is the effect of this radical stripping down to essential structure? It is to create the art of Matisse’s “Fauve:” a “barbaric” and “primitive” art. This is not a matter of nakedness, of a success via scandal, of shocking the bourgeoisie.

Consider, for example, Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Here he uses simplified lines and angular shapes and creates faces as African masks. The “primitive” emotional immediacy and power of the painting arises from combining stark nakedness with those abstract forms and artifices. Picasso’s many later Cubist works develop and expand the logic and “expressivity” of combining raw intensity and abstract geometric form. MacCarthy alerts us to the purpose of this connection between abstraction and primitive immediacy: “Primitive art, like the art of children,” connect us to “the original expressiveness” of life; it aims “to recover the lost expressiveness and life” in art. We can hear the echo of Freud and Jung in the assumption that reconnecting creativity to the primal and mythic truths can restore meaning and feeling to modern life.

Consider, too, Matisse’s “The Dance.” The flowing figures of the dancers are radically outlined and simplified, they are isolated on a flat ground, and there is the simple and bold use of color. As Matisse traces the dancers’ gestures, the beauty and immediacy of his rhythmic and seemingly improvisatory line achieve a stripping down to essential form, which captures the core emotion and human beauty of the dance, fluid and ‘in process,’ a living humanity emphasized all the more by the imperfect grace of the single break in the circle of dancers’ hands.

I want to end this post by suggesting one element of the relationship between modernist “Post-Impressionist” art and postmodernism. Matisse’s “The Music Lesson” fills the flattened surfaces of wall and floor and piano with beautifully fluid lines evoking foliage, decorative designs at intervals on the music stand and latice work, simplified human faces and expressions, all harmoniously composed and conveying the gracious energy and feeling of the musical moment.

The second image is a postmodern painting, which appropriates the Matisse not out of mockery but in order to comment both on it and on its other subject, my ‘postmodern’ novel “Hungry Generations,” for which my wife Jeanette Arax Melnick painted this (below) as the book cover. At least one significant pleasure of postmodern art results from a process of pastiche which adds extra layers of effect to classic and modern texts and images; these added levels can have the impact sometimes of homage, sometimes of travesty, and sometimes of satire, but in each case the usual effect is to add meaning as commentary. Such is the difference between postmodern borrowings and those of Shakespeare (the most inspired thief among artists) or even of Picasso’s appropriations of Valesquez images. [The difference is illustrated by my “Hungry Generations.” Its hero is a young postmodern composer who integrates travestying echoes of music by his favorite composers into his works in an effort to make some inner sense of the fracturing chaos he experiences in contemporary Los Angeles, where he meets the troubled family of a famed expatriate piano virtuoso. The novel’s own borrowings do something rather similar; here's an Amazon link to the novel: Hungry Generations: a novel].
My next post weekly posts will explore some features of modern fiction (and perhaps soon, modern music).