Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love

By Joyce Carol Oates

And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?

Birkin thinking of Gerald, Women in Love

In a little-known story of Lawrence’s called “The Christening” an elderly wreck of a man contemplates his illegitimate grandchild and attempts to lead his embarrassed and impatient household in a prayer in “the special language of fatherhood.” No one listens, no one wishes to hear. He is rambling, incoherent, bullying even in his confession and self-abnegation, yet his prayer is an extraordinary one: he implores God to shield the newborn child from the conceit of family life, from the burden of being a son with a specific father. It was his own interference with his children, his imposition of his personal will, that damaged them as human beings; and he prays that his grandson will be spared this violation of the spirit. Half-senile he insists upon his prayer though his grownup children are present and resentful:

“Lord, what father has a man but Thee? Lord, when a man says he is a father, he is wrong from the first word. For Thou art the Father, Lord. Lord, take away from us the conceit that our children are ours . . . . For I have stood between Thee and my children; I’ve had my way with them, Lord; I’ve stood between Thee and my children; I’ve cut ‘em off from Thee because they were mine. And they’ve grown twisted, because of me . . . . Lord, if it hadn’t been for me, they might ha’ been trees in the sunshine. Let me own it, Lord, I’ve done ‘em mischief. It would ha’ been better if they’d never known no father.”

Between the individual and the cosmos there falls the deathly shadow of the ego: the disheveled old man utters a truth central to Lawrence’s work. Where the human will is active there is always injury to the spirit, always a perversion, a “twisting”; that human beings are compelled not only to assert their greedy claims upon others but to manipulate their own lives in accord with an absolute that has little to do with their deeper yearnings constitutes our tragedy. Is it a tragedy of the modern era; is it inevitably bound up with the rise of industry and mechanization? Lawrence would say that it is, for the “material interests” of which Conrad spoke so ironically are all that remain of spiritual hopes; God being dead, God being unmasked as a fraud, nothing so suits man’s ambition as a transvaluing of values, the reinterpretation of religious experience in gross, obscene terms. Here is Gerald Crich, one of Lawrence’s most deeply realized and sympathetic characters, surely an alter ego of his—

In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony . . . . And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation.1

Harmony becomes organization. And Gerald dedicates himself to work, to feverish, totally absorbing work, inspired with an almost religious exaltation in his fight with matter. The world is split in two: on one side matter (the mines, the miners), on the other side his own isolated will. He wants to create on earth a perfect machine, “an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition”; a man of the twentieth century with no nostalgia for the superannuated ideals of Christianity or democracy, he wishes to found his eternity, his infinity, in the machine. So inchoate and mysterious is the imaginative world Lawrence creates for Women in Love that we find no difficulty in reading Gerald Crich as an allegorical figure in certain chapters and as a quite human, even fluid personality in others. As Gudrun’s frenzied lover, as Birkin’s elusive beloved, he seems a substantially different person from the Gerald Crich who is a ruthless god of the machine; yet as his cultural role demands extinction (for Lawrence had little doubt that civilization was breaking down rapidly, and Gerald is the very personification of a “civilized” man), so does his private emotional life, his confusion of the individual will with that of the cosmos, demand death—death by perfect cold. He is Lawrence’s only tragic figure, a remarkable creation in a remarkable novel, and though it is a commonplace to say that Birkin represents Lawrence, it seems equally likely that Gerald Crich represents Lawrence—in his deepest, most aggrieved, most nihilistic soul.

Women in Love is an inadequate title. The novel concerns itself with far more than simply women in love; far more than simply women in love. Two violent love affairs are the plot’s focus, but the drama of the novel has clearly to do with every sort of emotion, and with every sort of spiritual inanition. Gerald and Birkin and Ursula and Gudrun are immense figures, monstrous creations out of legend, out of mythology; they are unable to alter their fates, like tragic heroes and heroines of old. The mark of Cain has been on Gerald since early childhood, when he accidentally killed his brother; and Gudrun is named for a heroine out of Germanic legend who slew her first husband. The pace of the novel is often frenetic. Time is running out, history is coming to an end, the Apocalypse is at hand. Dies Irae and The Latter Days (as well as The Sisters and The Wedding Ring) were titles Lawrence considered for the novel, and though both are too explicit, too shrill, they are more suggestive of the chiliastic mood of the work (which even surprised Lawrence when he read it through after completion in November of 1916: it struck him as “end-of-the-world” and as “purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating”).2

Women in Love is a strangely ceremonial, even ritualistic work. In very simple terms it celebrates love and marriage as the only possible salvation for twentieth-century man and dramatizes the fate of those who resist the abandonment of the ego demanded by love: a sacrificial rite, an ancient necessity. Yet those who “come through”—Birkin and Ursula—are hardly harmonious; the novel ends with their arguing about Birkin’s thwarted desire for an “eternal union with a man,” and one is given to feel that the shadow of the dead man will fall across their marriage. And though the structure of the novel is ceremonial, its texture is rich, lush, fanciful, and, since each chapter is organized around a dominant image, rather self-consciously symbolic or imagistic; action is subordinate to theme. The perversity of the novel is such that its great subject of mankind’s tragically split nature is demonstrated in the artwork itself, which is sometimes a fairly conventional novel with a forward-moving plot, sometimes a gorgeous, even outrageous prose poem on the order of the work Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire were doing in the previous century. Birkin is sometimes a prophetic figure, and sometimes merely garrulous and silly; Ursula is sometimes a mesmerizing archetypal female, at other times shrill and possessive and dismayingly obtuse. In one of Lawrence’s most powerful love scenes Gerald Crich comes by night to Gudrun’s bedroom after his father’s death and is profoundly revitalized by her physical love, but Gudrun cannot help looking upon him with a devastating cynicism, noting his ridiculous trousers and braces and boots, and she is filled with nausea of him despite her fascination. Gudrun herself takes on in Gerald’s obsessive imagination certain of the more destructive qualities of the Magna Mater or the devouring female, and she attains an almost mythic power over him; but when we last see her she has become shallow and cheaply ironic, merely a vulgar young woman. It is a measure of Lawrence’s genius that every part of his immensely ambitious novel works (with the possible exception of the strained chapter “In The Pompadour”) and that the proliferating images coalesce into fairly stable leitmotifs: water, moon, darkness, light, the organic and the sterile.

Theodor Adorno – Minima Moralia

The melancholy science, from which I make this offering to my friend, relates to a realm which has counted, since time immemorial, as the authentic one of philosophy, but which has, since its transformation into method, fallen prey to intellectual disrespect, sententious caprice and in the end forgetfulness: the teaching of the good life. What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses. To speak immediately of what is immediate, is to behave no differently from that novelist, who adorns their marionettes with the imitations of the passions of yesteryear like cheap jewelry, and who sets persons in motion, who are nothing other than inventory-pieces of machinery, as if they could still act as subjects, and as if something really depended on their actions. The gaze at life has passed over into ideology, which conceals the fact, that it no longer exists.

But the relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades in reality into an ephemeral appearance of the former, is completely absurd. Means and ends are interchanged. The intuition of this ludicrous quid pro quo has not been totally expunged from life. The reduced and degraded essence bristles tenaciously against its ensorcelment in the façade. The change of the relations of production itself depends more than ever on what befalls the “sphere of consumption,” the mere reflection-form of production and the caricature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of individuals. Only by virtue of opposition to production, as something still not totally encompassed by the social order, could human beings introduce a more humane one. If the appearance [Schein] of life were ever wholly abrogated, which the consumption-sphere itself defends with such bad reasons, then the overgrowth of absolute production will triumph.

In spite of this, considerations which begin from the subject have as much that is false in them, so much as life becomes appearance [Schein]. Because the overwhelming objectivity of the contemporary phase of historical movement consists solely of the dissolution of the subject, without a new one appearing in its stead, individual experience necessarily relies on the old subject, the historically condemned one, which is still for itself, but no longer in itself. It thinks of its autonomy as still secure, but the nullity, which the concentration camps demonstrated to subjects, already overtakes the form of subjectivity itself. Something sentimental and anachronistic clings to the subjective consideration, no matter how critically sharpened against itself: something of the lament about the way of the world, which is not to be rejected for the sake of its good intentions, but because the lamenting subject threatens to harden in its being-just-so [Sosein] and thereby to fulfill once again the law of the way of the world. The fidelity to one’s own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of falling into infidelity, by denying the insight, which reaches beyond the individuated [Individuum] and which calls the latter’s substance by name.

Thus argued Hegel, whose method schooled that of Minima Moralia, against the mere being-for-itself of subjectivity on all its levels. Dialectical theory, averse to everything which is singular, cannot permit aphorisms to be valid as such. In the best of cases they may be tolerated, in the words of the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as “conversation.” The latter’s time however is over. Nevertheless the book does not forget the totality-claim of the system, which does not wish anyone to escape it, any more than the rebellion against the latter. Hegel does not pay heed to the subject in accordance with the requirement, which he otherwise passionately defends: that of being in the matter [Sache] and not “always beyond it,” instead of “entering into the immanent content of the matter [Sache].” If the subject is disappearing today, aphorisms take on the weighty responsibility of “considering that which is disappearing itself as essential.” They insist, in opposition to Hegel’s procedure and nevertheless in concordance with his thought, on negativity: “The life of the Spirit [Geistes] wins its truth only by finding itself in what is absolutely torn apart. It is not this power as the positive, which looks away from the negative, as when we say of something, that it is nothing or wrong, and now, done with that, pass over from there to something else; rather it is this power only when it stares the negative in the face, tarrying on it.”

The dismissive gesture, with which Hegel in contradiction to his own insight, constantly runs roughshod over the individual, derives paradoxically enough from his necessary bias for liberalistic thought. The conception of a totality harmonious throughout all its antagonisms compels him to rank individuation, however many times he designates it as the driving moment of the process, as something lesser in the construction of the whole. That in prehistory the objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, indeed by virtue of the annihilation of the individual, without the reconciliation implied by the concept of the generality and the particular ever being historically achieved, this is distorted in Hegel: with lofty iciness he opts once more for the liquidation of the particular. Nowhere does he doubt the primacy of the whole. The more dubious the transition from the reflecting singularization to the glorified totality remains, as much in history as in Hegelian logic, the more enthusiastically philosophy clings, as justification of the existent, to the victorious motorcade of the objective tendency. The development of the social principle of individuation into the victory of fatality already gives it occasion enough. Since Hegel hypostatizes bourgeois society as much as its founding category, the individuated [Individuum], he could not truly carry out the dialectic between the two. Admittedly, he assures us, with classical economics, that the totality produces and reproduces itself out of the interrelation of the antagonistic interests of its members. But he naively regards the individuated [Individuum] as such solely as that which is irreducibly given [Gegebenheit], which he just dismantled in his theory of cognition. In the individualistic society however the generality is realized not only through the interplay of individuals, rather the society is essentially the substance of the individuated [Individuum]. …

Documentary: shaking the world

For years I’ve been arguing, in Sight & Sound and elsewhere, that to talk about the insight African cinema affords into the social and political problems of the continent is to patronise the films. I’ve ranted that we should be interested in the movies of the recently departed Ousmane Sembène not because they are vehicles carrying information about post-colonial society but because they are great films. After all, we don’t go to see Ingmar Bergman movies because of what they say about Sweden in the 1960s. Sembène’s cinema does, of course, also reveal much about its milieu – its power structures, attitudes and dress codes – just as Martin Scorsese’s films do about New York City. But it’s not the first thing it does.

Now, however, as curator of the Ten Documentaries That Shook the World season at BFI Southbank, I’ve had to do a U-turn. I’ve set aside questions of aesthetics to ask an empirical one: which films have had a demonstrable impact on the social, legislative or political climate in which they were made? I allowed myself to be vague about what a film is (there are made-for-TV pieces in the selection), but was determined not to commit the sin of Anglocentrism. So from China we’ll show Heshang – The River Elegy (Jun Xia, 1988); from Japan Minamata: The Victims and Their World (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1972); from the US Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988); from Britain Death of a Nation – The Timor Conspiracy (John Pilger and David Munro, 1994), BBC News Ethiopia Report (Michael Buerk and Mohammed Amin, 1984) and McLibel (Franny Armstrong, 2005); from Germany Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936); from France The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1970);and from Iran For Freedom (Hussein Torabi, 1980).

Heshang fuelled a debate about China’s relationship to western-style democracy that culminated in the Tiananmen Square protests and their brutal suppression in 1989. It set out to change the Chinese world, but ended up doing so, in part, in the wrong direction. Tsuchimoto’s Minamata film charts the heartbreaking process by which a group of fishermen took the Chisso conglomerate to court for polluting the watercourse with methyl mercury. This is the original environmental documentary, and Chisso was forced to change its operation as a result. As is well known, Bowling for Columbine made Wal-Mart stop selling certain types of bullets, while The Thin Blue Line, the original miscarriage-of-justice film, won Texan drifter Randall Adams a reprieve. The outrage caused by The Timor Conspiracy was so great that it helped to bring about the liberation of East Timor in 1999. Bob Geldof saw Michael Buerk’s Ethiopia Report, co-conceived Live Aid, and improved hundreds of thousands of African lives. McDonald’s pulled out of schools advertising as a result of the legal challenge against the company documented in McLibel. Despite Leni Riefenstahl’s lifelong claims to the contrary, as the central piece of Hitlerian marketing in the 1930s, Triumph of the Will helped to swing Germany behind its psychotic Führer. TheSorrow and the Pity, banned from French TV for more than a decade, removed the glow from France’s sense of its wartime self. And For Freedom, shown every year on Iranian TV, shores up the apparent triumph of Khomeini’s 1979 revolution.

The Chinese, German, Iranian and French films changed the moods of their nations, in some cases re-evaluating the past to influence the present. The three corporate films – tackling McDonald’s, Chisso and Wal-Mart – are David and Goliath parables. Though documentary as formulated by John Grierson in Britain in the 1930s was a social force for the left, the Iranian and German films are right-wing works. And Pilger’s and Buerk’s pieces on East Timor and Ethiopia are powerful televisual expressions of post-colonial liberalism. …