1 00:00:11,050 --> 00:00:18,700 If you come to the seventh lecture in this series on Lawrences critical fortunes during his life and since his death, 2 00:00:18,700 --> 00:00:26,890 you will learn that the peak of Lawrence's popularity was reached nearly 40, 40 years ago, around about 1970. 3 00:00:26,890 --> 00:00:31,090 So we all have the pleasure of being 40 years behind the times. 4 00:00:31,090 --> 00:00:37,450 1970 might have been before your parents and after your grandparents were at secondary school. 5 00:00:37,450 --> 00:00:41,650 But ask members of either of the generations above, 6 00:00:41,650 --> 00:00:49,900 and you may well find that Lawrence loomed far larger in their consciousness when they were your age than he does in yours. 7 00:00:49,900 --> 00:00:56,830 Now, it can be a lonely experience choosing to specialise in Lawrence at University now, 8 00:00:56,830 --> 00:01:05,500 as opposed to as opposed to, say, his contemporaries T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. 9 00:01:05,500 --> 00:01:15,280 But speak to a grandparent, and especially, it has to be said, a grandfather and especially a working class bearded grandfather. 10 00:01:15,280 --> 00:01:21,310 And he will probably be able to tell you much about how Lawrence was taught in his own time. 11 00:01:21,310 --> 00:01:26,440 So if in the era in which this lecture hall was opened in 1964, 12 00:01:26,440 --> 00:01:32,680 a lecturer had asked the students how much Lawrence they had already read, most would have read a great deal. 13 00:01:32,680 --> 00:01:43,060 Indeed, it it's unusual to have a series of nine lectures that seven and two classes on Lawrence, which is in fact a sign of the times, 14 00:01:43,060 --> 00:01:49,900 which is a modest, critical upswing in swearing, which I am doing everything I can to be part of. 15 00:01:49,900 --> 00:01:54,490 To give you an overview of these lectures, which is also on your handouts, 16 00:01:54,490 --> 00:02:03,400 this lecture is on Lawrence's relationship to consciousness and to the recently in his time theorised unconscious. 17 00:02:03,400 --> 00:02:08,050 What did Lawrence make of Freud of the mind body problem? 18 00:02:08,050 --> 00:02:20,560 How do we deal with the fact that he seems to contradict himself in explicitly advocating and theorising and making conscious, unconscious being, 19 00:02:20,560 --> 00:02:31,630 I should say, is the shortest, but also the densest of the lectures next week will concern Lawrence's mistakenly, supposedly absent. 20 00:02:31,630 --> 00:02:40,690 In other words, it isn't absent sense of humour, wit, drollery, jocularity, facetiousness, amusement and fun. 21 00:02:40,690 --> 00:02:50,230 The third lecture will be on Lawrence's relationship to Christianity, to God and to Christ, whom he in many ways resembles. 22 00:02:50,230 --> 00:02:55,390 He was aware of this and so were his disciples. 23 00:02:55,390 --> 00:03:08,190 But insofar as Lawrence consciously measured himself up against Christ, it was as a rival, a critic, a lifestyle coach and an assailant. 24 00:03:08,190 --> 00:03:13,320 He railed at him as he railed at his very best friends. 25 00:03:13,320 --> 00:03:20,940 He certainly never left Christianity behind, even though he came to reject some of its ethics, most of its dogma. 26 00:03:20,940 --> 00:03:24,860 Nor was he ever, I would say, an atheist. 27 00:03:24,860 --> 00:03:31,580 The fourth lecture will look at Lawrence's relation to other countries, and in particular the two, which meant a lot to him, 28 00:03:31,580 --> 00:03:42,350 Germany and Italy, but it will follow him and his travels to Ceylon, Australia, the USA, Mexico, Switzerland and France where he died. 29 00:03:42,350 --> 00:03:53,630 It will consider his views on ethnicity and race. The fifth lecture, in a slight change to what was on the the printed lecture list, 30 00:03:53,630 --> 00:04:00,200 will look in more detail at one of the areas discussed in the fourth lecture, which is the Alps. 31 00:04:00,200 --> 00:04:04,190 Alpine scenery became part of Lawrence's psychic landscape. 32 00:04:04,190 --> 00:04:12,230 As anyone who has read Women in Love knows and anyone who has ever been in high mountains may be able to appreciate 33 00:04:12,230 --> 00:04:19,130 the fact that he writes about it better than any other prose writer of the 20th century with whom I'm familiar. 34 00:04:19,130 --> 00:04:26,540 The sixth lecture concerns Lawrence's relationship to the non-human world birds, beasts and children. 35 00:04:26,540 --> 00:04:34,010 I think that he wrote about children as well as nature with more acuity than anyone I can think of. 36 00:04:34,010 --> 00:04:36,530 The seventh lecture, as I mentioned, 37 00:04:36,530 --> 00:04:45,260 deals with Lawrence's popularity and critical reputation over time and introduces to you the major names in Lawrence criticism. 38 00:04:45,260 --> 00:04:54,950 I'll particularly be discussing the trial of Penguin Books for publishing and unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960. 39 00:04:54,950 --> 00:05:05,990 And what followed from the fact that Penguin rather than the Crown one, I'll also consider the relative popularity of his different genres of work. 40 00:05:05,990 --> 00:05:15,530 Over time, Lawrence stands out amongst writers of any time or place for the number of genres he wrote in novels, 41 00:05:15,530 --> 00:05:22,610 short stories, poems, translations from Italian and Russian into English letters, 42 00:05:22,610 --> 00:05:32,690 literary criticism, social criticism, historiography psychology and his travel writings, which are a combination of many of the above. 43 00:05:32,690 --> 00:05:43,590 He also painted, given the amount that he wrote in 44 years of declining health, it's a wonder that he found any time for living. 44 00:05:43,590 --> 00:05:48,060 Only if, of course, writing isn't living. 45 00:05:48,060 --> 00:05:55,860 Finally, in eighth week, there will be two classes in a seminar room to be announced at times and days to be announced. 46 00:05:55,860 --> 00:05:59,940 This will be a chance to ask questions and offer your own opinions. 47 00:05:59,940 --> 00:06:06,600 And most people do sooner rather than later, find that they have an opinion on Lawrence. 48 00:06:06,600 --> 00:06:09,300 The first class will be on fascism. 49 00:06:09,300 --> 00:06:18,390 One reason why Lawrence was relatively unpopular during the Second World War was that people like Bertrand Russell said that Lawrence's ideas, 50 00:06:18,390 --> 00:06:26,400 quote, led straight to Auschwitz like Nicha, who had a considerable influence on him. 51 00:06:26,400 --> 00:06:35,550 He was accused of Proteau or pseudo fascism, particularly in the last decade of his life, which was the nineteen twenties. 52 00:06:35,550 --> 00:06:37,860 He died in nineteen thirty, 53 00:06:37,860 --> 00:06:48,300 and I am certain that he would have denounced all continental fascist movements and indeed Stalinism had he lived to see their ugliest developments. 54 00:06:48,300 --> 00:06:57,650 But I also see that there is something in the charge against Lawrence as there is also something in the charge against nature. 55 00:06:57,650 --> 00:07:05,510 The second class will be on his plays, which offer an interesting perspective on the rest of his works, 56 00:07:05,510 --> 00:07:13,430 but generally very little known, and this course will involve some dramatic enactment on the part of willing volunteers. 57 00:07:13,430 --> 00:07:22,760 So to start on today's topic, which is consciousness in practise, that means that it's also about the unconscious, the intellect, 58 00:07:22,760 --> 00:07:32,750 the brain, the body and the soul in dealing with this topic first and really taking a Laurentian bull by the horns, 59 00:07:32,750 --> 00:07:38,690 but hopefully will indicate some way of some ways of reading him and of reading his contradictions, 60 00:07:38,690 --> 00:07:47,090 because if you expect Lawrence not to contradict himself, you will have an extremely frustrating time in trying to write about him. 61 00:07:47,090 --> 00:07:53,300 But I'm going to start with a man who was theorising the mind in a way that was new in the history of humankind. 62 00:07:53,300 --> 00:08:03,980 Whilst Burty, as he was then known, Lawrence was a little boy running around the Nottinghamshire coal mining town of Eastwood, Sigmund Freud. 63 00:08:03,980 --> 00:08:06,890 There are several reasons for starting with him. 64 00:08:06,890 --> 00:08:16,010 First, Lawrence entered adulthood at precisely the time that Freud's theories were first being popularised in England. 65 00:08:16,010 --> 00:08:27,040 Second, both writers thought and wrote a great deal about sex and thought sexuality as central to the functioning of the individual. 66 00:08:27,040 --> 00:08:37,450 Third, when Lawrence went round to visit his former professor of modern foreign languages at Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley, 67 00:08:37,450 --> 00:08:44,590 on the 16th of March 1912, and Professor Weekley happened to be out, 68 00:08:44,590 --> 00:08:51,100 and Lawrence was entertained instead by Professor Weekly's aristocratic German wife. 69 00:08:51,100 --> 00:08:57,490 The first thing that for that Frida ever spoke to Lawrence about was Freud. 70 00:08:57,490 --> 00:09:08,080 And the reason for this was that Frida herself had recently had an affair with Otto Gorse, who was a maverick poet disciple of Freud's. 71 00:09:08,080 --> 00:09:17,440 Fourth, in the very year after Lawrence eloped with Frieda, he published his second novel, Sons and Lovers, 72 00:09:17,440 --> 00:09:24,910 this is heavily autobiographical and concerns the tension between poor morals, emotions as a son and as a lover. 73 00:09:24,910 --> 00:09:34,180 His mother's demands that he be a son rather than a lover or a lover son, and his fractious relationship with his father. 74 00:09:34,180 --> 00:09:44,660 It was therefore immediately seised upon by contemporary critics as a sophisticated literary exploration of the Oedipus complex. 75 00:09:44,660 --> 00:09:54,010 Yet Lawrence is very definitely not a Freudian. For one thing, there is no firm evidence that he ever read Freud. 76 00:09:54,010 --> 00:09:59,560 That doesn't mean that he didn't. And in fact, he was likely to have read at least some. 77 00:09:59,560 --> 00:10:08,620 Freud was fashionable in the artistic and intellectual circles which Lawrence was entering in the early teens of the 20th century, 78 00:10:08,620 --> 00:10:15,610 and he'd just fallen in love with a stranger who opened a conversation by talking about Freud. 79 00:10:15,610 --> 00:10:20,440 On the other hand, Lawrence did tend to mention what he was reading in his letters. 80 00:10:20,440 --> 00:10:27,760 And the eight published volumes of these letters make no mention of Freud's works that didn't. 81 00:10:27,760 --> 00:10:39,340 In any case, however much or little he read of Freud, stop him from stridently disagreeing with him or dismissing his ideas as magic and charlatans. 82 00:10:39,340 --> 00:10:46,060 He makes this clear in his nineteen twenty one work psychoanalysis and the unconscious, 83 00:10:46,060 --> 00:10:53,260 or rather that he doesn't actually make it clear because this is a notoriously unclear work amongst Lawrence's non-fiction. 84 00:10:53,260 --> 00:10:54,730 This was pointed out to him. 85 00:10:54,730 --> 00:11:05,440 So he wrote another book in the following year containing very much the same ideas and some new ones, which is much clearer and more entertaining. 86 00:11:05,440 --> 00:11:11,080 Its playfulness is reflected in the title Fantasia of the Unconscious, 87 00:11:11,080 --> 00:11:18,640 and those two works are often found in the same volume psychoanalysis and the unconscious and Fantasia of the unconscious. 88 00:11:18,640 --> 00:11:26,340 And over the course of this lecture, since it concerns consciousness. I'm going to be quoting from both of those. 89 00:11:26,340 --> 00:11:32,680 Its main conceptual arguments with Freud are, as I see it, as follows. 90 00:11:32,680 --> 00:11:42,670 First, Freud implied that repression in general is wrong, including, for example, repression of the desire to commit incest. 91 00:11:42,670 --> 00:11:48,460 We unconsciously repressed desires all the time, and this can lead to psychological disorders, 92 00:11:48,460 --> 00:11:57,550 which is why psychotherapy often works by bringing up into consciousness what had been repressed in order to deal with it. 93 00:11:57,550 --> 00:12:03,430 In fact, to claim that Freud said that all repression is unhealthy is grossly to misread Freud. 94 00:12:03,430 --> 00:12:13,810 But as we've seen, Lawrence didn't necessarily read Freud, and this criticism would certainly have fitted with a popularised version of him. 95 00:12:13,810 --> 00:12:24,820 Secondly, Lawrence found freude too concerned with sex, as he says, we are bound to admit that into all human relationships, 96 00:12:24,820 --> 00:12:30,940 particularly adult human relationships, a large element of sex enters. 97 00:12:30,940 --> 00:12:38,320 We are thankful that Freud has insisted on this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to Earth. 98 00:12:38,320 --> 00:12:45,960 Out of all our clouds of superfine us, half a loaf is better than no bread. 99 00:12:45,960 --> 00:12:57,940 But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is not sex, and a sexual motive is not to be attributed to all human activities. 100 00:12:57,940 --> 00:13:06,600 We know it without need to argue. Was the building of the cathedrals are working up towards the act of creation? 101 00:13:06,600 --> 00:13:11,580 Don't let us have sex for. We've all got too much of it under the table. 102 00:13:11,580 --> 00:13:20,060 And really, for my part, I prefer to keep mind there, no matter what the Freudians say about me. 103 00:13:20,060 --> 00:13:24,950 Third, fourth thought that men were fundamentally unintegrated, 104 00:13:24,950 --> 00:13:33,170 the way in which a Freudian man is put together is forever, to some degree unreconciled, conflicted. 105 00:13:33,170 --> 00:13:37,400 His view of life was more tragic than comic. 106 00:13:37,400 --> 00:13:46,580 Lawrence thought or hoped that an individual could be reconciled within himself if only he lived in the kind of ways that Lawrence was trying to feel 107 00:13:46,580 --> 00:13:59,480 his way towards making conscious and then advocating much of Lawrence's aim in his fiction and non-fiction is to tell us and show us just this. 108 00:13:59,480 --> 00:14:04,880 In addition, Lawrence thought that Freud lowered the dignity of mankind. 109 00:14:04,880 --> 00:14:11,730 Remember those three supposed 19th century hammer blows to the to the dignity and status of humanity? 110 00:14:11,730 --> 00:14:24,770 Darwin, Marx, Freud. Lawrence thought that humans frequently abased themselves, but that humanity itself was not necessarily low or disgusting. 111 00:14:24,770 --> 00:14:32,690 His reaction to Freud, in other words, is tinged by indignation and a touch of prudery. 112 00:14:32,690 --> 00:14:38,040 We waited as Freud went into the cave of the unconscious. 113 00:14:38,040 --> 00:14:45,460 He came out with sex and excrement, which dissolved in the light of day. 114 00:14:45,460 --> 00:14:52,750 Fourth, Lawrence charged that Floyds unconscious is a production of the conscious mind, 115 00:14:52,750 --> 00:15:00,300 the unconscious is a concept, therefore it's conscious, therefore it's an act of paradox. 116 00:15:00,300 --> 00:15:07,830 This is a more interesting point, and we'll see how long strained to avoid falling into the same contradiction of 117 00:15:07,830 --> 00:15:14,610 which she accused Freud in describing an unconscious which cannot be conceived, 118 00:15:14,610 --> 00:15:24,230 only experienced. His hostility to Freud on this point may in part have been based on self recognition. 119 00:15:24,230 --> 00:15:29,270 He also objected to Freud's unconscious on the grounds that it was a negation, 120 00:15:29,270 --> 00:15:36,770 the projected absence of something, the unconscious rather than something substantial in its own right. 121 00:15:36,770 --> 00:15:39,020 Now, this is unfair to Freud. 122 00:15:39,020 --> 00:15:47,720 It was precisely one of the distinguishing characteristics of Freud's unconscious or unbossed sign originally called It Doesn't Work, 123 00:15:47,720 --> 00:15:53,660 but was a sign that was signified by the word consider the difference between. 124 00:15:53,660 --> 00:16:02,990 I unconsciously scratched my head and I scratched my head because something in my unconscious prompted me to do so. 125 00:16:02,990 --> 00:16:07,640 In the first case, unconscious means an absence of consciousness. 126 00:16:07,640 --> 00:16:18,440 In the second, it refers to the contents of the mind, which is not habitually accessed by or indeed accessible to the consciousness. 127 00:16:18,440 --> 00:16:26,110 It was around 1870 that the term unconscious was first used in this more positive way. 128 00:16:26,110 --> 00:16:30,940 But Lawrence wanted to still more substantial bodily kind of unconsciousness, 129 00:16:30,940 --> 00:16:40,810 and he didn't want a negative term for it on something, he came up with another which he preferred, not that he came up with it. 130 00:16:40,810 --> 00:16:47,040 The word had been around for over a millennium. It is soul. 131 00:16:47,040 --> 00:16:54,030 This word has a checkered history, it developed as a translation of several different concepts, 132 00:16:54,030 --> 00:17:01,830 the Greek panorama or breath as in pneumatic, the Latin genius, 133 00:17:01,830 --> 00:17:13,770 the Latin Spiritus or spirit, the Latin anima, the English word soul became associated with the essence of an individual which could survive death. 134 00:17:13,770 --> 00:17:19,710 But for a long time, it embraced the whole spectrum of consciousness, including the intellect. 135 00:17:19,710 --> 00:17:26,140 But in the 19th century, the soul became particularly associated with the unconscious. 136 00:17:26,140 --> 00:17:32,820 And this neatly fits with the way in which Lawrence uses the term which he does abundantly. 137 00:17:32,820 --> 00:17:39,160 The term also have the advantages for him of being ancient and religious. 138 00:17:39,160 --> 00:17:50,260 He was happy, though, to make it cooperate with modern technological and psychological vocabulary, so, for example, Critch is rather terrible. 139 00:17:50,260 --> 00:18:00,140 Appearance was photographed upon Goodwins soul away beneath her consciousness. 140 00:18:00,140 --> 00:18:05,690 The human soul had been around for a long time, photography for less than a century, 141 00:18:05,690 --> 00:18:11,330 but once it came and supposed that something could be photographed on a soul, 142 00:18:11,330 --> 00:18:20,870 at least in metaphore, Lawrence says that he can't define soul, but nor could a bike define its rider. 143 00:18:20,870 --> 00:18:25,810 Our mistake is to pretend that there is no one in the saddle. 144 00:18:25,810 --> 00:18:32,690 Let me repeat that. He can't define soul, but nor could a bike define its rider. 145 00:18:32,690 --> 00:18:39,600 Our mistake is to pretend that there's no one in the saddle. 146 00:18:39,600 --> 00:18:48,390 In Lawrences time, the term soul was in part the slightly old fashioned and embarrassing term that it is again today, 147 00:18:48,390 --> 00:18:55,620 how many of us in everyday speech uses without self-consciousness the term soul? 148 00:18:55,620 --> 00:19:03,900 There is some of this defensiveness and embarrassment in Lawrence's use of it in a passage in Women in Love. 149 00:19:03,900 --> 00:19:10,860 Those of you who've read this novel will know that it opens with a wedding between someone called Laura and someone called Tibs. 150 00:19:10,860 --> 00:19:22,040 Tips is very late for his own wedding for the reason that he's got into a discussion with someone else about the immortality of the soul. 151 00:19:22,040 --> 00:19:27,140 When a friend called Marshall, he is of this at the reception after the wedding, 152 00:19:27,140 --> 00:19:31,970 he scoffs sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married. 153 00:19:31,970 --> 00:19:38,530 The immortality of the soul. But he fell quite flat. 154 00:19:38,530 --> 00:19:46,060 So Marshall then storms off from the conversation with the comment, Too much bloody soul and talk altogether, 155 00:19:46,060 --> 00:19:57,670 thus neatly anticipating many critics objections to women in love as a whole, too much bloody soul and talk altogether. 156 00:19:57,670 --> 00:20:00,190 Marshall is not an admirable character, 157 00:20:00,190 --> 00:20:10,160 and the ridicule of his scepticism near the novel's beginning lends weight to the novel's many subsequent uses of the term soul. 158 00:20:10,160 --> 00:20:14,240 But it's also worth noting that Lawrence wasn't alone in using it. 159 00:20:14,240 --> 00:20:20,390 The novel is set in the near present and several of the arty intellectual set who were 160 00:20:20,390 --> 00:20:25,850 gathered around a character called her Maione use the term in their conversation. 161 00:20:25,850 --> 00:20:34,700 In fact, it had nearly been made fashionable partly as a result of the craze for Russian literature, 162 00:20:34,700 --> 00:20:43,970 in which the equivalent term Tushar was or was perceived to be a very important concept at this time of the craze for Russian literature, 163 00:20:43,970 --> 00:20:47,180 which roughly coincided with the First World War in England. 164 00:20:47,180 --> 00:20:53,060 Many people use the term soul with a capital letter, especially when talking about the Russian. 165 00:20:53,060 --> 00:21:01,580 So now Lawrence, who ridiculed the Russian craze whilst in part taking part in it, never did this. 166 00:21:01,580 --> 00:21:06,860 But it wasn't just the influence of Russian literature which made the term fashionable. 167 00:21:06,860 --> 00:21:13,040 There was in general around the First World War, an interest in England in depth psychology. 168 00:21:13,040 --> 00:21:19,880 This drew not only on modern psychoanalysis, but on Christian theology, non Christian theologies. 169 00:21:19,880 --> 00:21:26,600 There was a lot of interest in Hinduism and various kinds of modern mysticism like theosophy. 170 00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:31,650 This was also the boom time for spiritualism and sciences. 171 00:21:31,650 --> 00:21:40,710 Lawrence was not distinctive, therefore, in being interested in these things, nor did he stand out alone in disagreeing with Freud. 172 00:21:40,710 --> 00:21:44,940 He was distinctive in the particular conclusions he came to. 173 00:21:44,940 --> 00:21:51,180 He wasn't a camp follower and he can't be described as an artist of any kind. 174 00:21:51,180 --> 00:21:55,590 He was a Laurentian and he found followers. 175 00:21:55,590 --> 00:22:03,540 Now, to try and describe what his ideas were, we have to have a slight digression on the mind body problem. 176 00:22:03,540 --> 00:22:13,770 This problem has kept theologians, philosophers and medical doctors in disagreement with each other for as long as their disciplines have existed. 177 00:22:13,770 --> 00:22:19,530 The problem is all mental phenomena, physical phenomena. 178 00:22:19,530 --> 00:22:27,690 And if not, how do mental phenomena relate to physical phenomena? 179 00:22:27,690 --> 00:22:36,420 Dualists give the answer that the mind and the body are separate substances, Plato and Descartes believed this. 180 00:22:36,420 --> 00:22:44,970 There may be causal interactions in one or both directions between them, but they are separate kinds of thing. 181 00:22:44,970 --> 00:22:54,570 The body takes up space. The mind doesn't. Modernists, as the name suggests, hold that there is only one kind of substance, 182 00:22:54,570 --> 00:23:02,430 but they differ as to what this is, idealist modernists believe that everything is mental. 183 00:23:02,430 --> 00:23:09,120 The 18th century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley advocated this view that to be is to be perceived. 184 00:23:09,120 --> 00:23:16,680 The fact that a table is hard or the to white board is white is a mental phenomenon. 185 00:23:16,680 --> 00:23:23,820 Materialist monocytes believe the opposite, that everything is material hobs was a materialist. 186 00:23:23,820 --> 00:23:28,680 Richard Dawkins is one now on this spectrum. 187 00:23:28,680 --> 00:23:32,280 Lawrence is very hard to place. 188 00:23:32,280 --> 00:23:44,590 The fact that there is confusion can partly be explained in terms of his heterodox attitude towards scientific and philosophical language altogether. 189 00:23:44,590 --> 00:23:57,980 He said in Fantasia of the unconscious that science doesn't answer any problems, just sets more with their fingers in their noses. 190 00:23:57,980 --> 00:24:07,250 Quote, That is one of your scientist friends. However, he did not dismiss science outright and claimed that he himself was being a kind of scientist, 191 00:24:07,250 --> 00:24:14,270 one that used not just his intellect or his powers of observation, but his whole being. 192 00:24:14,270 --> 00:24:25,490 He called this subjective science, such as he thought the Egyptians and the Greeks had had when science and religion were in accord. 193 00:24:25,490 --> 00:24:33,560 He also says that his science and philosophy come from his literary writing rather than the other way round. 194 00:24:33,560 --> 00:24:38,390 Quote, this pseudo philosophy of mine, and that is his term. 195 00:24:38,390 --> 00:24:46,550 This pseudo philosophy of mine is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. 196 00:24:46,550 --> 00:24:52,220 Indeed, there is a strong degree of correspondence between Lawrence's non-fiction and his fiction, 197 00:24:52,220 --> 00:24:58,270 which is why, if you're interested in Lawrence, it is very well worth reading the non-fiction to. 198 00:24:58,270 --> 00:25:03,700 So to return to the question of whether Lawrence was a modernist or idealist or something else, 199 00:25:03,700 --> 00:25:11,410 on the one hand, at times he seems to be a dualist, he wrote in a letter to Ernest Smith in 1999. 200 00:25:11,410 --> 00:25:15,070 You were my first live teacher of philosophy. 201 00:25:15,070 --> 00:25:26,030 You showed me the way out of a torturing, crude modernism, past pragmatism into a sort of crude, but appeasing pluralism. 202 00:25:26,030 --> 00:25:39,490 But at times, he talks about three levels of individual existence, the body, the spirit which is mental and the soul, which isn't exactly either. 203 00:25:39,490 --> 00:25:49,480 And then again, at times, he sounds like a materialist when he says there is no utterly immaterial existence, no spirit. 204 00:25:49,480 --> 00:25:55,240 The distinction is between living plasm and inanimate matter. 205 00:25:55,240 --> 00:25:59,710 Look at how often he describes rocks as living. 206 00:25:59,710 --> 00:26:06,790 A split in the living rock, or he discusses whether a chair is living or not, but then there can be inanimate matter. 207 00:26:06,790 --> 00:26:14,170 When Gerald dies, his corpse is described as inanimate. It's merely a corpse because of the way he died. 208 00:26:14,170 --> 00:26:17,560 It's not always easy to follow Lawrence. And as I say, 209 00:26:17,560 --> 00:26:27,280 I've been quoting here from several works psychoanalysis in the unconscious fantasy of the unconscious and studies in classic American literature. 210 00:26:27,280 --> 00:26:38,620 But the sense overall that I have of him is this Everything in the universe is of two kinds, a live material and dead material. 211 00:26:38,620 --> 00:26:44,380 This is not the distinction between, let's say, a live rabbit and the corpse of a rabbit. 212 00:26:44,380 --> 00:26:53,080 It is the distinction between something which is spiritually alive and something which has no spiritual existence at all. 213 00:26:53,080 --> 00:27:00,240 Every person has a soul. It is created out of nothing at their conception. 214 00:27:00,240 --> 00:27:08,550 They have a body and they also have a mind or spirit or consciousness who uses those three terms pretty much interchangeably. 215 00:27:08,550 --> 00:27:15,570 The soul is the most important part of the individual and should take control of everything else. 216 00:27:15,570 --> 00:27:22,580 Neither the body nor the mind should be allowed to take charge. 217 00:27:22,580 --> 00:27:31,130 At death, the body sinks towards Earth and is of no further importance, the soul splits into component parts. 218 00:27:31,130 --> 00:27:34,910 And now we're in one of the odder parts of Fantasia of the unconscious. 219 00:27:34,910 --> 00:27:40,400 The soul splits into its component parts and flies towards the sun and the moon. 220 00:27:40,400 --> 00:27:47,550 But it still has a physical nature and it's part of the physical matter of the whole universe. 221 00:27:47,550 --> 00:27:58,980 So far, so confused now because male and female bodies are different, therefore male and female souls are necessarily different. 222 00:27:58,980 --> 00:28:07,230 And this is one issue that cultural feminists, as opposed to those feminists who believe that gender is culturally so, 223 00:28:07,230 --> 00:28:10,500 which is to say, those who believe that gender is culturally determined. 224 00:28:10,500 --> 00:28:18,890 That's one of the issues that they have with Lawrence, that there is a difference between the male soul and the female soul. 225 00:28:18,890 --> 00:28:26,630 In psychoanalysis and the unconscious, he and that amortises the body in terms of spiritual principles, 226 00:28:26,630 --> 00:28:30,650 so the back of the body is connected with the male principle, 227 00:28:30,650 --> 00:28:38,720 the cervical ganglia, the lumbar ganglion and the sacral ganglia, and each has its associated spiritual principles. 228 00:28:38,720 --> 00:28:47,290 The front of the body contains the female principle, the cervical plexus, the solar plexus and the hyper gastric plexus. 229 00:28:47,290 --> 00:28:58,600 Changes in the body are therefore also social changes, as, for example, at puberty, the nose indicates character. 230 00:28:58,600 --> 00:29:02,230 Look at people's body shapes in Lawrence, they're always important, 231 00:29:02,230 --> 00:29:06,970 they always mean something, it's important that Lady Chatterley's Bottom is not small. 232 00:29:06,970 --> 00:29:14,440 It can't be for her to be the character that she is. It's also important that her lover's thighs are not large. 233 00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:19,540 Large thighs on men are always suspicious. For Lawrence, just a small bottoms are on women. 234 00:29:19,540 --> 00:29:27,100 Teething hurts us because we've become too spiritual. And before we decide that this is all too odd, 235 00:29:27,100 --> 00:29:34,780 bear in mind that you don't need to be fully versed in this physiological metaphysical psychology in order to read his works, 236 00:29:34,780 --> 00:29:42,790 though some knowledge of it does help. And secondly, Lawrence was writing it at a time at which ideas which are far, 237 00:29:42,790 --> 00:29:52,600 far stranger than any around now, were current, and many of them were, from a modern perspective, repugnant. 238 00:29:52,600 --> 00:29:57,430 So let us say roughly then that for Lawrence, everything is material. 239 00:29:57,430 --> 00:30:01,510 Only some things are spiritually alive. 240 00:30:01,510 --> 00:30:11,860 Electricity for him can be spiritual and is involved in the body precisely as modern scientists believe that it is in women in love. 241 00:30:11,860 --> 00:30:17,170 Harmony at one stage get in a rage with her almost ex lover, Birken, 242 00:30:17,170 --> 00:30:22,960 and tries to kill him by bashing in his skull with a lapis lazuli light paperweight. 243 00:30:22,960 --> 00:30:31,780 He's reading a book and as she stands there holding the paperweight above him, quote, terrible shocks ran over her mind. 244 00:30:31,780 --> 00:30:40,910 His body like shocks of electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck her down. 245 00:30:40,910 --> 00:30:47,270 True, technically, this is a simile, as if many volts of electricity struck her down, 246 00:30:47,270 --> 00:30:53,810 but it is often the case with Lawrences similes that they are interchangeable with literal usage. 247 00:30:53,810 --> 00:31:00,650 He doesn't actually need the as if and on another occasion, he might not have used it. 248 00:31:00,650 --> 00:31:14,840 For example, Burkean describes Japanese jujitsu fighters as possessing a curious kind of full electric fluid like eels, that isn't metaphore. 249 00:31:14,840 --> 00:31:19,100 In Fantasia of the unconscious, successful sex is, quote, 250 00:31:19,100 --> 00:31:28,520 the bringing together of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarised electric blood of the female, 251 00:31:28,520 --> 00:31:41,280 with the result of a tremendous flashing interchange which changes the constitution of the blood and the very quality of being in both. 252 00:31:41,280 --> 00:31:50,850 But there is also an aspect of the human body which is not spiritually important, if someone involuntarily farts, for example, that is meaningless. 253 00:31:50,850 --> 00:32:00,010 It does not indicate degradation of that person's soul. Lawrence, therefore, also distinguishes between two kinds of dream, 254 00:32:00,010 --> 00:32:08,800 there were soul dreams which interpret the soul to itself, but actually he considers those to be a minority of dreams. 255 00:32:08,800 --> 00:32:18,130 He considers the majority of dreams to be merely mechanical, to be produced by, for example, eating too much cheese before bedtime. 256 00:32:18,130 --> 00:32:28,720 And here again is a point of disagreement with Freud, who considered most dreams, if not quite all, to be of deep psychological significance. 257 00:32:28,720 --> 00:32:38,140 After Birken has been biffed on the head by her Maione, he hasn't been killed because Homogenise Fingers came between his head and the paperweight. 258 00:32:38,140 --> 00:32:42,490 He leaves her house and wanders out into the countryside. 259 00:32:42,490 --> 00:32:52,030 Once he reaches a cops on a hillside, he takes off all his clothes, lies down in the vegetation and kind of has sex with it. 260 00:32:52,030 --> 00:32:59,140 Now, this event is presented primarily as a movement of the soul, not as a kind of madness, 261 00:32:59,140 --> 00:33:08,470 having been brought on by virtue of having been biffed on the head after he has had this ecstasy, which is spiritually important. 262 00:33:08,470 --> 00:33:13,870 He takes the train into Nottingham and then he starts feeling really bad. 263 00:33:13,870 --> 00:33:17,410 He has concussion. In other words, he has a week or two in bed. 264 00:33:17,410 --> 00:33:28,880 But the narrative shows nothing of this week or two in bed because it is merely an illness of the body of no spiritual importance to Burkin. 265 00:33:28,880 --> 00:33:38,930 I think that Lawrence considered his own developing tuberculosis insofar as he allowed himself to think about it at all in these terms, 266 00:33:38,930 --> 00:33:46,560 as spiritually irrelevant as having no connexion to his essential soul. 267 00:33:46,560 --> 00:33:54,870 When he went back in visit to the woman who will become his next lover, Ursula, and he is looking phosphorescent, 268 00:33:54,870 --> 00:34:01,120 he replies to her question, Don't you feel well with I hadn't thought about it. 269 00:34:01,120 --> 00:34:08,960 Ursula responds, You ought to suffer a man who takes as little notice of his body as that. 270 00:34:08,960 --> 00:34:16,310 The narrative itself takes little notice and in the same way is Berkin Lawrence disliked physiologically 271 00:34:16,310 --> 00:34:24,360 determined states and much of his writing can be understood as a struggle to transcend them. 272 00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:30,840 So the bodies should be kept in its place, but the mind should be kept in its place also, 273 00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:38,610 it should not seek to dictate to or diminish the rest of the south, which he calls the spontaneous centres. 274 00:34:38,610 --> 00:34:44,040 The job of control, as I've said before, should be done by the soul. 275 00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:49,890 And especially as anyone who's read the lengthy extracts on your handouts will know, 276 00:34:49,890 --> 00:34:57,480 the mind should not seek to encompass sex in Lawrence's version of The Fall of Man. 277 00:34:57,480 --> 00:35:03,510 And he did a lot of this rewriting of biblical stories, as we'll see see in the third week. 278 00:35:03,510 --> 00:35:11,930 In his version of The Fall of Man, the expulsion from paradise happened because sex was brought into the mind. 279 00:35:11,930 --> 00:35:20,340 Adam and Eve had been happily having sex. What went wrong was when they started thinking about it, then they became ashamed. 280 00:35:20,340 --> 00:35:25,520 Then they knew they were naked. Then they had to make clothes. 281 00:35:25,520 --> 00:35:33,890 Consciousness also inhibits spontaneity and spontaneity is a great good for Lawrence, 282 00:35:33,890 --> 00:35:41,000 he says spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong. 283 00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:45,170 In other words, you shouldn't condemn something because you know it to be wrong, 284 00:35:45,170 --> 00:35:52,560 but because your soul revolts from it in involuntary, spontaneous disgust. 285 00:35:52,560 --> 00:35:59,100 So there were scenes in Lawrence's novels in which characters entirely lose their self-consciousness, 286 00:35:59,100 --> 00:36:05,090 the mind's role has been curtailed, and this is generally good for them. 287 00:36:05,090 --> 00:36:11,300 Again, and Women in Love Burkean wrestles with his best friend, Gerrold naked. 288 00:36:11,300 --> 00:36:16,670 They're both a bit embarrassed by this at first, but they gradually get into it and as they do, 289 00:36:16,670 --> 00:36:23,420 they learn a kind of mutual physical understanding and when they do, they wrestle better. 290 00:36:23,420 --> 00:36:30,320 Eventually they are wrestling swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless. 291 00:36:30,320 --> 00:36:38,030 At last, Birkins eyes are wide and dreadful and sightless. 292 00:36:38,030 --> 00:36:45,380 Afterwards, when they are panting and recovering Borking comments, one ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close. 293 00:36:45,380 --> 00:36:52,980 It makes one sane. So it follows that the intellect should be kept in check. 294 00:36:52,980 --> 00:37:02,440 Lawrence was working class, the son of a coal miner, and he did share some of the content of his class for the intelligentsia. 295 00:37:02,440 --> 00:37:08,290 Once he'd made some literary friends in London, he had social entry to the academic elite, 296 00:37:08,290 --> 00:37:18,160 as it happens at Cambridge University and once went on a visit there, but was disgusted by it, it made him dream of black Beatles. 297 00:37:18,160 --> 00:37:24,440 He was particularly revolted, that is to say, by the Cambridge mode of homosexuality. 298 00:37:24,440 --> 00:37:34,570 The intellectuals he was most attracted to tended to be anti rationalists, for example, German romantics such as Howdah and Schelling. 299 00:37:34,570 --> 00:37:41,970 In the early 20s, he was of the opinion that most people should never learn to read or write. 300 00:37:41,970 --> 00:37:51,000 By the mid 20s, he had reached the slightly softer opinion that learning should not be forced beyond the three R's, 301 00:37:51,000 --> 00:37:55,860 children should have four hours of teaching a day to the age of 12, 302 00:37:55,860 --> 00:38:03,870 then either technical or academic education, and which a child was to be received, which a child was to receive, 303 00:38:03,870 --> 00:38:11,760 would be determined by aristocrats of the sole who are Lawrences true aristocrats. 304 00:38:11,760 --> 00:38:19,920 In Women in Love, the half intellectual conversation at Homogenise House is presented as malevolent. 305 00:38:19,920 --> 00:38:27,750 It is implicated by analogy in the First World War, which is contemporary with the writing and the setting of this novel. 306 00:38:27,750 --> 00:38:32,850 The talk at Bradley went on like a rattle of small artillery. 307 00:38:32,850 --> 00:38:39,680 It's also implicated in the Satanic. They are all witches helping the pot to bubble. 308 00:38:39,680 --> 00:38:50,720 Ursula is cruelly exhausted by the powerful, consuming, destructive mentality that emanated from the company, it will be. 309 00:38:50,720 --> 00:38:51,860 On the other hand, though, 310 00:38:51,860 --> 00:39:02,030 Lauren seised all of the education that was available to him up to and including a scholarship to University College Nottingham. 311 00:39:02,030 --> 00:39:06,170 And in Women in love, opposition to education is attacked. 312 00:39:06,170 --> 00:39:07,760 So this is on your handouts. 313 00:39:07,760 --> 00:39:16,640 In the third chapter of the novel called Classroom, Úrsula is teaching a primary school class about the structure of catkins. 314 00:39:16,640 --> 00:39:21,770 It was Lawrence's favourite subject by far at school and university botany. 315 00:39:21,770 --> 00:39:27,890 At the end of her lesson, Birken and her Maione walk in to visit her. 316 00:39:27,890 --> 00:39:39,690 Hamani argues against mass education on the grounds that children who are roused to consciousness are crippled in their souls. 317 00:39:39,690 --> 00:39:44,250 She is then fiercely attacked by Birken for saying this Birken bear in mind, 318 00:39:44,250 --> 00:39:49,530 more than any other character in the novel, resembles Laurence Burke and challenges her. 319 00:39:49,530 --> 00:39:56,130 Would you rather for yourself know or not know that the little red flowers are there? 320 00:39:56,130 --> 00:40:05,250 She has no answer. Birkins argument that children are at present imprisoned with a limited false set of concepts 321 00:40:05,250 --> 00:40:11,880 implies that a certain kind of education and a certain kind of discipline would free them. 322 00:40:11,880 --> 00:40:21,950 In other words, Lawrence in this scene uses her mind to repudiate certain tendencies which he recognised in himself. 323 00:40:21,950 --> 00:40:29,680 And in fact, at a later point in the novel, Ursula accuses Burkin of being like her Maione. 324 00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:34,330 This is fair, if you were to read this passage without knowing who was speaking, 325 00:40:34,330 --> 00:40:38,980 everything that Homogenise saying you would get, you would probably guess that it was Burkin. 326 00:40:38,980 --> 00:40:49,990 But then Birken rounds on her for her hypocrisy. But Burkean elsewhere, just like Amaney pronouncers on the desirability of being unconscious, 327 00:40:49,990 --> 00:40:54,760 quote, spontaneously to run or move like a fish in the water. 328 00:40:54,760 --> 00:41:01,720 The mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between man and woman, a further sensual experience. 329 00:41:01,720 --> 00:41:03,580 Birken To give him credit, though, 330 00:41:03,580 --> 00:41:13,360 is aware of the contradiction involved in these thoughts and even more of the contradiction involved in trying to persuade others of them. 331 00:41:13,360 --> 00:41:19,840 He asks himself. Perhaps you'd been wrong to go to Ursula with an idea of what he wanted. 332 00:41:19,840 --> 00:41:26,920 Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning? 333 00:41:26,920 --> 00:41:33,700 If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfilment? 334 00:41:33,700 --> 00:41:39,340 The two did not agree very well. This always is not, of course, literally true. 335 00:41:39,340 --> 00:41:48,130 He is not always talking about sensual fulfilment, but this does acknowledge the high proportion of the novel which Birken spends in talking, 336 00:41:48,130 --> 00:41:53,710 just as it does the high proportion of Lawrence's life that he spent in writing. 337 00:41:53,710 --> 00:41:59,770 When Ursula accuses Birken of self-contradiction, quote, he turned in confusion. 338 00:41:59,770 --> 00:42:07,540 There was always confusion in speech, yet it must be spoken whichever way one moved. 339 00:42:07,540 --> 00:42:13,090 If one were to move forwards, one must break away through and to know. 340 00:42:13,090 --> 00:42:22,890 To give utterance was to break away through the walls of the prison as the infant in labour strives through the walls of the womb. 341 00:42:22,890 --> 00:42:28,440 Occasionally, he stops his own preaching to practise what he preaches, 342 00:42:28,440 --> 00:42:37,200 so he's explaining to us about a new kind of love on the road to Bell Dover and then he suddenly stops and kisses her. 343 00:42:37,200 --> 00:42:45,630 He then thinks I was becoming quite dead alive, nothing but a word bag, he said in triumph, scorning his other self. 344 00:42:45,630 --> 00:42:51,720 Yet somewhere far off and small, the other self hovered. 345 00:42:51,720 --> 00:42:58,560 Thus far, I've been describing Birken as a layered character who is aware of his contradictions and therefore 346 00:42:58,560 --> 00:43:05,940 psychologically similar to the kind of character you would find in a 19th century realist novel, 347 00:43:05,940 --> 00:43:09,660 especially perhaps George Eliot, by whom Lawrence was influenced. 348 00:43:09,660 --> 00:43:14,880 But there is an also an aspect to his character which is new and which reminds you that you are, 349 00:43:14,880 --> 00:43:19,980 in fact reading a modernist novel, not a 19th century one. 350 00:43:19,980 --> 00:43:28,230 Lawrence claimed in a letter to Edward Garnett that he that he had found, quote, a different attitude to my characters. 351 00:43:28,230 --> 00:43:38,190 And he's no longer so interested in the what he calls the old fashioned human element in this other aspect of Birkins presentation. 352 00:43:38,190 --> 00:43:44,250 His speech is his action. After all, Burkean isn't real. 353 00:43:44,250 --> 00:43:52,500 He exists only in words whether or not these words are inside speech marks for him or outside of them. 354 00:43:52,500 --> 00:44:04,820 And insofar as Burkean exists in speech exists in language, there is no contradiction in him talking about being unconscious. 355 00:44:04,820 --> 00:44:13,730 This aspect of Birken changes his mind repeatedly throughout the novel, often without any apparent psychological motivation. 356 00:44:13,730 --> 00:44:20,330 So what we have here is not a bildungsroman, the story of the spiritual development of the central character, 357 00:44:20,330 --> 00:44:28,280 but it's Lawrence's repeated attempts to formulate through the voice of a character what it is he believes, 358 00:44:28,280 --> 00:44:36,280 or to use his own terms to the attempts of his consciousness to interpret his soul. 359 00:44:36,280 --> 00:44:41,560 So to give an example of Birkins shifts of position across this novel, which, as I say, 360 00:44:41,560 --> 00:44:49,270 have no obvious external motivation, he starts by extolling sensuality and nothing else. 361 00:44:49,270 --> 00:44:54,250 Then he says that love between a man and a woman is the be all and end all. 362 00:44:54,250 --> 00:45:00,700 Then he rejects love and humanity altogether and imagines an apocalypse fondly. 363 00:45:00,700 --> 00:45:04,970 Then he demands stellar equilibrium between man and woman. 364 00:45:04,970 --> 00:45:10,240 Then he kisses Ursula and agrees that love is enough. Then he rejects love. 365 00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:16,720 Then he thinks of sex as polarisation. Then he wants blood brotherhood with Gerrold. 366 00:45:16,720 --> 00:45:22,150 Then he wants a further sensual experience, or he wants no abstract annihilation. 367 00:45:22,150 --> 00:45:27,760 Or he wants the creative way of proud individuals, singleness or marriage, 368 00:45:27,760 --> 00:45:33,340 or being free in a free place to with a few other people to want in connexion with a man. 369 00:45:33,340 --> 00:45:39,550 Again, Ursula complains that Birken always contradicts himself, 370 00:45:39,550 --> 00:45:48,070 but that's because she's interacting with him as a real person whom she finds frustrating a hypocrite and a bully. 371 00:45:48,070 --> 00:45:57,550 We, however, are not having to deal with him as an actual person, his words on a page and we can respond to him more as a prop. 372 00:45:57,550 --> 00:46:03,940 That's what I'm suggesting is new in Lawrences mode of characterisation here. 373 00:46:03,940 --> 00:46:08,620 These two aspects of Birkins character, though, don't quite sit with each other. 374 00:46:08,620 --> 00:46:18,730 It's as though, despite his claim to Garnett, Lawrence didn't quite have the courage to leave behind the old fashioned, realistic kind of character. 375 00:46:18,730 --> 00:46:25,630 This is why when you're reading Lawrence, you're often not quite sure whether, in fact, you're reading a realist novel or a modernist one. 376 00:46:25,630 --> 00:46:33,100 Birkins self-criticism also indicates Lawrence's concern about being accused of the same things. 377 00:46:33,100 --> 00:46:43,180 But he and Lawrence feel that the struggle into consciousness of how to live and what the soul is is a necessary struggle. 378 00:46:43,180 --> 00:46:49,630 To alleviate his spiritual malaise. He has to struggle into greater consciousness of soul, 379 00:46:49,630 --> 00:46:56,680 truth as expressed in metaphysical terms as his friend who then became is an enemy, John Middleton. 380 00:46:56,680 --> 00:47:07,970 Murray summed it up. We have to learn through consciousness where and how to be unconscious, learn it and pass it on. 381 00:47:07,970 --> 00:47:18,800 Birken can't live as unconsciously as the simplest, most pleasant like characters in his works or like Ursula's parents, nor should he. 382 00:47:18,800 --> 00:47:23,090 What he should, according to Lawrence, do, is keep his consciousness forever, 383 00:47:23,090 --> 00:47:30,630 listening to his deepest self or his soul and teaching us to do the same. 384 00:47:30,630 --> 00:47:36,660 My final comment comes from an essay Lawrence wrote in 1923 when he was living in Mexico. 385 00:47:36,660 --> 00:47:42,150 It started as a response to Ulysses, which had come out the year before. 386 00:47:42,150 --> 00:47:48,840 And this essay is called Surgery for the novel Hyphen or a Bomb. 387 00:47:48,840 --> 00:47:57,570 Lawrence, in general, was not good at titles. Women in Love is an appallingly bad and misleading title, but this is a good one. 388 00:47:57,570 --> 00:48:03,600 In this essay, Lawrence laments the day when philosophy and fiction were split. 389 00:48:03,600 --> 00:48:09,750 He says that as a result, the novel went sloppy and philosophy went abstract. 390 00:48:09,750 --> 00:48:15,000 Dry philosophy and religion were now too algebraic. 391 00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:25,980 The novel was too emotional. Women in love can be read as emotion and philosophy, striving to come together again. 392 00:48:25,980 --> 00:48:31,280 They strive, I leave it to you to judge how well they succeed. 393 00:48:31,280 --> 00:48:38,771 Thank you.