"you Will Crawl On Your Belly And You Will Eat Dust All The Days Of Your Life"

The idea that the unspoken and unspeakable part of life can be articulated though art is a reoccurring theme in Lawrence's Women in Love. "[it is art because] It conveys the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it." (p.66) Interestingly, this has paradoxical implications regarding the form of the work itself; Why would the author choose specifically the medium of words to show that speaking is not enough, that language is part of the ash-filled forbidden fruit? I propose that Lawrence gives an answer to why he chose words, and it can be decrypted from his juxtaposition of the sisters. Whereas Ursula and Birkin respond to the insufficiency of Mind by achieving a duality where all is one and speech becomes obsolete, the sister-soul artists, Loerke and Gudrun (and to a certain extent, Gerald) stand irrevocably firm in their position of conscious awareness, always "seeing", never to "be". They live in perpetual ironic cynicism at the ignoble joke. So again: since Lawrence shows that in a pure state of truth, having transcended consciousness, you don't need to speak; why did he write Women in Love? I will argue that he writes because Gudrun's stance "wins", because this novel is precisely a homage to non-perfection, the beauty of damnation- of ultimate sterility and its pain. Of being these self-conscious, dispossessed, aching, nauseated humans, and that all this is aesthetically divine; that "the machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful." (p.370) From the opening, the reader is made aware that heaven, full-ness, is not enough. The novel begins at the childhood home of the female protagonists. It is paralleled to the Garden of Eden and is immediately shown to be sorely lacking. The town is described as a sort of essential, primordial place preceding shame; "sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed, No one was ashamed of it all"(p.7) The villagers betray a prelapsarian lack of conceptual consciousness, which strikes Gudrun as spectral, un-alive, "The people are all ghouls [.] everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid."(p.7) They seem to have an absence behind the eyes, their gaze is referred to as "that long, unwearying stare of aborigines" (p.7). This links to the later image of Possum's "inchoate eyes"(p.58) and that of the African sculpture "it was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost to meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Possum in it [.] Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing" (p.66). All of these "primitive" awareness styles belong to the same essential and condensed type of disposition. They have achieved death of mind through "ultimate physical consciousness, mindless" (p.66) This is what Gerald means by "essentially, they don't exist, they aren't there."(p.18): They who are at-one and stripped of Ego may as well be dead. Indeed, the nature and growth and animal fertility of the countryside landscape, far from coming across as life-affirming, seems already subterranean. Its very fecundity is decomposition just as much as it is rebirth; "it is like a country in an underworld". The repetition of "soiled" "soot" "sordid" evokes the ashes, bears a premature stamp of ignominious death. (p.148) Because Gudrun is transcendentally aware, her perception of this lost place is injected with morbidity. Looking back at the Primordial Unconscious from which she has been banished "is like being mad". Because it is Hell to see Eden through the eyes of Mind, ultra-awareness equates with madness. This issue arises when characters enter a state of mind where "knowledge" spirals into infinity. For example, during the meal scene when Birkin cannot help but see everything as a macrocosmic chess game, "like a game with the figures set out, the same figures, the Queen of chess, the knights, the pawns, the same now as they were hundreds of years ago, the same figures moving round in one of the innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known."(p.83) the theme of insanity is put across by repetition of "madness", "known" and "endlessly, endlessly, endlessly" (p.83) This lays emphasis on the heavy sense of circularity and repetition. Birkin's mind damns him; he has seen it all, can predict everyone`s actions, and there are no surprises. Furthermore, as Alan Watts said; "A completely predictable future is already the past"(Watts, 211), so life happens around Birkin like something pre-finished. The likening of the dining scenario to a tomb accentuates moribund-ness and an element of insanity because it strengthens the impression that everything is set in stone, but stone that is self-reflexive, self-perceiving, and losing its mind at the endless sameness, yet not able not to play its role. The madness occurs when the characters are made to face the emptiness of even fruitfulness itself. When the world is predictable; that is to say, natural, following its organic course, it comes full circle. The mechanics of the universe follow a set pattern without deviances, and therefore is as good as over. As Birkin confirms when he speaks of his unwillingness to settle down and own furniture "You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside" (p.311) The aesthetics of incompletion is so appealing because otherwise, when Mind fails to interrupt, distract and elevate, we hit against a barrenness unique to matter's ad-infinitum multiplication, facing which the Ego must self-annihilate or you feel like you're losing your mind. Two options present themselves, then. Remain unfinished or dispose of the Ego through completion. Both are illustrated through the opposite paths the sisters take. Ursula becomes finished, whereas Gudrun, like Loerke, must "live like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit" (p.374) Ursula and Birkin's obliteration occurs when they reach perfect understanding Nor can I say I love you, when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect silence and bliss. 323 The peace of ego-death that ripeness tends to recalls Nietzsche's vine-knife imagery wherein the knife is blessed, for all the grapes really want is to be cut down. "Pour out in trembling tears all your sorrow at your fullness and at the vine's urgency for the vintager and the vine-knife!" (Nietzsche, 173) Lawrence echoes this through Ursula's perspective when she feels she must die, having lived the ultimate of all there will ever be for her; "after all, when one is fulfilled, one was happiest in falling into death, as bitter fruit plunges its ripeness downwards" (p.165) Yet, there is something brutish to the surrender of self, something that strikes at integrity, like selling-out. This comes across through Birkin when he loses the fight against matter- Not this, not this [.] in the small core of the flame was an unyielding anguish of another thing. But he was lost; he only wanted her [.] far away there seemed to be a small lament in the darkness. But what did it matter? What did it matter, what did anything matter save this ultimate triumphant experience of physical passion [.] Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered. 161 On the other hand, the price of remaining conscious is that of "withering in the bud" (p.4). These characters, painfully aware, take themselves too seriously to take themselves seriously, and must encrust themselves in irony. Everything becomes comical; they cannot forget it means nothing, and so everything is a joke. Their laughter is that of the damned at their own insides, which "are full of bitter, corrupt ash [.] because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe."(p.109). The dark core of comedy is embodied and epitomised within Loerke's "black look of inorganic misery, which lay behind all his small buffoonery."(p.368) Damnation is intimately linked with work and art. This is because all mediums of distraction are manifestations of a holding-back, the clenched fist in the heart that says "no". Gudrun expresses this when she thinks "I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists" because subjected to her intellectualizing, everything reduces itself to its end which never ends. "She could see far, as far as eternity- yet she saw nothing" (p.302) Yet, she would have it otherwise; she prefers to see nothing than to not see, since it's not worth the compromise to belong to a world that is lacking, as is expressed when Gudrun says "Oh my dear, my dear, the game isn't worth even you. You are a fine thing really- why should you be used on such a poor show!" (p.365) Similarly, when Gerald evaluates the two naked artists in the London flat, whereas one is described as "the human animal, golden skinned and bare, somehow humiliating" the other "was different. The animal was not there at all, only the heavy, broken body". The first, "so healthy and well made" makes Gerald feel ashamed, repelled "seemed to him to retract from him his own dignity. Was that all a human being amounted to? So uninspired!" (p.65) There is a sense of the mind deserving more. A certain heroism is attributed to the doomed attempts at expression and its fingernails-on-chalkboard drawn-out resistance to momentum. Gerald dedicates himself 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, an the other side his isolated will. He wants to create on earth the perfect machine, "an activity of pure order" (Oates, 161) Art and work become a sort of semi-solution, a defiance, with which they buck away from organic life, since, as Birkin says, "humanity is less, far less, than the individual", and happiness is not worth the price extorted. In conclusion, I hold that the core of this story can be synopsized as the perfect antithesis of Oates's evaluation, that is to say, that; 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 ego demanded by love: a sacrificial rite, an ancient necessity. 162 Instead, the key to the novel's nucleus can be found in the cross beside which Gerald lies down to die of cold. "the cross itself is the symbol of mankind's self-division [.] Christ's agony on the cross symbolizes the human agony at having acquired, or having been poisoned by, the "sin" of knowledge and self-consciousness."(Oates, 162) It is the beauty of the futile expressions of ache that play the central role. As is pointed out in one of Loerke and Gudrun's conversations, who later speak of the tedium of love, "What one does with one's life has peu de rapport [.] what one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being."(p.392): It is the fight worth writing about, the same fight that is writing in the first place. Therefore, the characters who clench their teeth and hold onto their despair that are more positive in essence, since they would rather suffer than give themselves up to the death-process that is Aphrodite. Gudrun and Loerke resist, and the act of defiance towards Eden is comparable to the robust futility Dylan Thomas expresses when he writes "Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Lawrence's form and content are the same, and he uses words because there is no more adequate way to express the damnation that the artist choses.

References: Lawrence, Women in Love, Great Britain: Clays Ltd, 1992 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, United States: Algora Publishing, 2003 Oates, Joyce Carol- Critical Inquiry, "Lawrence`s "Götterdämmerung": The Tragic Vision of Women in Love", Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Shen, Patrick, dir. Flight from Death: The Quest of Immortality, Transcendental Media, 2003. Documentary Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, USA: Cambridge University Press, January 2000 Thomas, Dylan- "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" Watts, Alan- Become What You Are, Boston, USA: Shambhala Publications, 1995