Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
1 - Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Looking across Lawrence's literary career, a number of persistent questions arise. He wrote during the period of ‘high modernism’, but is he a modernist? He wrote novels, poems, plays, but also essays, letters, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, history; he painted too. So, is his work primarily or most significantly literary? He began life as Britain's most famous working-class writer, married an aristocrat, moved restlessly from country to country as a loose member of the international intelligentsia, and declared that ‘one can belong absolutely to no class’ (‘Autobiographical Sketch’, P2, 595), so how would we fix him socially? He circled the world writing of, and from, and about, every place he lived in, yet whilst he (mostly) wrote in English, his fiction is not solely the chronicle of an Englishman abroad, or an Englishman writing of home from abroad. In particular, he wrote extensively of and in Mexico and the USA, and America published him when Britain wouldn't. His work can be read as an extensive critique of Englishness, although this might be the one thing which does mark him as English. How then would we judge the national identity of his writing?
The work of this chapter is to answer some of these questions by exploring Lawrence's key positive terms: sex, life (or ‘quickness’), darkness, unconsciousness or blood-consciousness. These are not terms which stand alone, for the structures of Lawrence's thought are oppositional – he is a metaphysician, a dialectician, his terms of preference or celebration are always placed in a relationship of conflict or opposition with terms of condemnation. The page is then something of a philosophical battleground. Against active and healthy sexuality, he poses as negative terms consciousness and cerebral states of being, knowledge or sex ‘in the head’. Life is not opposed to death proper, but to a kind of living death which is the result, for Lawrence, of degenerate modern existence. ‘We have to choose between the quick and the dead’, he writes in his 1925 essay ‘The Novel’: ‘The quick is God-flame, in everything… . the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God.
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- D. H. Lawrence , pp. 12 - 40Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997