If you come to the seventh lecture in this series on Lawrences critical fortunes during his life and since his death,
you will learn that the peak of Lawrence's popularity was reached nearly 40, 40 years ago, around about 1970.
So we all have the pleasure of being 40 years behind the times.
1970 might have been before your parents and after your grandparents were at secondary school.
But ask members of either of the generations above,
and you may well find that Lawrence loomed far larger in their consciousness when they were your age than he does in yours.
Now, it can be a lonely experience choosing to specialise in Lawrence at University now,
as opposed to as opposed to, say, his contemporaries T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.
But speak to a grandparent, and especially, it has to be said, a grandfather and especially a working class bearded grandfather.
And he will probably be able to tell you much about how Lawrence was taught in his own time.
So if in the era in which this lecture hall was opened in 1964,
a lecturer had asked the students how much Lawrence they had already read, most would have read a great deal.
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,
which is a modest, critical upswing in swearing, which I am doing everything I can to be part of.
To give you an overview of these lectures, which is also on your handouts,
this lecture is on Lawrence's relationship to consciousness and to the recently in his time theorised unconscious.
What did Lawrence make of Freud of the mind body problem?
How do we deal with the fact that he seems to contradict himself in explicitly advocating and theorising and making conscious, unconscious being,
I should say, is the shortest, but also the densest of the lectures next week will concern Lawrence's mistakenly, supposedly absent.
In other words, it isn't absent sense of humour, wit, drollery, jocularity, facetiousness, amusement and fun.
The third lecture will be on Lawrence's relationship to Christianity, to God and to Christ, whom he in many ways resembles.
He was aware of this and so were his disciples.
But insofar as Lawrence consciously measured himself up against Christ, it was as a rival, a critic, a lifestyle coach and an assailant.
He railed at him as he railed at his very best friends.
He certainly never left Christianity behind, even though he came to reject some of its ethics, most of its dogma.
Nor was he ever, I would say, an atheist.
The fourth lecture will look at Lawrence's relation to other countries, and in particular the two, which meant a lot to him,
Germany and Italy, but it will follow him and his travels to Ceylon, Australia, the USA, Mexico, Switzerland and France where he died.
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,
will look in more detail at one of the areas discussed in the fourth lecture, which is the Alps.
Alpine scenery became part of Lawrence's psychic landscape.
As anyone who has read Women in Love knows and anyone who has ever been in high mountains may be able to appreciate
the fact that he writes about it better than any other prose writer of the 20th century with whom I'm familiar.
The sixth lecture concerns Lawrence's relationship to the non-human world birds, beasts and children.
I think that he wrote about children as well as nature with more acuity than anyone I can think of.
The seventh lecture, as I mentioned,
deals with Lawrence's popularity and critical reputation over time and introduces to you the major names in Lawrence criticism.
I'll particularly be discussing the trial of Penguin Books for publishing and unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960.
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.
Over time, Lawrence stands out amongst writers of any time or place for the number of genres he wrote in novels,
short stories, poems, translations from Italian and Russian into English letters,
literary criticism, social criticism, historiography psychology and his travel writings, which are a combination of many of the above.
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.
Only if, of course, writing isn't living.
Finally, in eighth week, there will be two classes in a seminar room to be announced at times and days to be announced.
This will be a chance to ask questions and offer your own opinions.
And most people do sooner rather than later, find that they have an opinion on Lawrence.
The first class will be on fascism.
One reason why Lawrence was relatively unpopular during the Second World War was that people like Bertrand Russell said that Lawrence's ideas,
quote, led straight to Auschwitz like Nicha, who had a considerable influence on him.
He was accused of Proteau or pseudo fascism, particularly in the last decade of his life, which was the nineteen twenties.
He died in nineteen thirty,
and I am certain that he would have denounced all continental fascist movements and indeed Stalinism had he lived to see their ugliest developments.
But I also see that there is something in the charge against Lawrence as there is also something in the charge against nature.
The second class will be on his plays, which offer an interesting perspective on the rest of his works,
but generally very little known, and this course will involve some dramatic enactment on the part of willing volunteers.
So to start on today's topic, which is consciousness in practise, that means that it's also about the unconscious, the intellect,
the brain, the body and the soul in dealing with this topic first and really taking a Laurentian bull by the horns,
but hopefully will indicate some way of some ways of reading him and of reading his contradictions,
because if you expect Lawrence not to contradict himself, you will have an extremely frustrating time in trying to write about him.
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.
Whilst Burty, as he was then known, Lawrence was a little boy running around the Nottinghamshire coal mining town of Eastwood, Sigmund Freud.
There are several reasons for starting with him.
First, Lawrence entered adulthood at precisely the time that Freud's theories were first being popularised in England.
Second, both writers thought and wrote a great deal about sex and thought sexuality as central to the functioning of the individual.
Third, when Lawrence went round to visit his former professor of modern foreign languages at Nottingham University, Ernest Weekley,
on the 16th of March 1912, and Professor Weekley happened to be out,
and Lawrence was entertained instead by Professor Weekly's aristocratic German wife.
The first thing that for that Frida ever spoke to Lawrence about was Freud.
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.
Fourth, in the very year after Lawrence eloped with Frieda, he published his second novel, Sons and Lovers,
this is heavily autobiographical and concerns the tension between poor morals, emotions as a son and as a lover.
His mother's demands that he be a son rather than a lover or a lover son, and his fractious relationship with his father.
It was therefore immediately seised upon by contemporary critics as a sophisticated literary exploration of the Oedipus complex.
Yet Lawrence is very definitely not a Freudian. For one thing, there is no firm evidence that he ever read Freud.
That doesn't mean that he didn't. And in fact, he was likely to have read at least some.
Freud was fashionable in the artistic and intellectual circles which Lawrence was entering in the early teens of the 20th century,
and he'd just fallen in love with a stranger who opened a conversation by talking about Freud.
On the other hand, Lawrence did tend to mention what he was reading in his letters.
And the eight published volumes of these letters make no mention of Freud's works that didn't.
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.
He makes this clear in his nineteen twenty one work psychoanalysis and the unconscious,
or rather that he doesn't actually make it clear because this is a notoriously unclear work amongst Lawrence's non-fiction.
This was pointed out to him.
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.
Its playfulness is reflected in the title Fantasia of the Unconscious,
and those two works are often found in the same volume psychoanalysis and the unconscious and Fantasia of the unconscious.
And over the course of this lecture, since it concerns consciousness. I'm going to be quoting from both of those.
Its main conceptual arguments with Freud are, as I see it, as follows.
First, Freud implied that repression in general is wrong, including, for example, repression of the desire to commit incest.
We unconsciously repressed desires all the time, and this can lead to psychological disorders,
which is why psychotherapy often works by bringing up into consciousness what had been repressed in order to deal with it.
In fact, to claim that Freud said that all repression is unhealthy is grossly to misread Freud.
But as we've seen, Lawrence didn't necessarily read Freud, and this criticism would certainly have fitted with a popularised version of him.
Secondly, Lawrence found freude too concerned with sex, as he says, we are bound to admit that into all human relationships,
particularly adult human relationships, a large element of sex enters.
We are thankful that Freud has insisted on this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to Earth.
Out of all our clouds of superfine us, half a loaf is better than no bread.
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.
We know it without need to argue. Was the building of the cathedrals are working up towards the act of creation?
Don't let us have sex for. We've all got too much of it under the table.
And really, for my part, I prefer to keep mind there, no matter what the Freudians say about me.
Third, fourth thought that men were fundamentally unintegrated,
the way in which a Freudian man is put together is forever, to some degree unreconciled, conflicted.
His view of life was more tragic than comic.
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
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.
In addition, Lawrence thought that Freud lowered the dignity of mankind.
Remember those three supposed 19th century hammer blows to the to the dignity and status of humanity?
Darwin, Marx, Freud. Lawrence thought that humans frequently abased themselves, but that humanity itself was not necessarily low or disgusting.
His reaction to Freud, in other words, is tinged by indignation and a touch of prudery.
We waited as Freud went into the cave of the unconscious.
He came out with sex and excrement, which dissolved in the light of day.
Fourth, Lawrence charged that Floyds unconscious is a production of the conscious mind,
the unconscious is a concept, therefore it's conscious, therefore it's an act of paradox.
This is a more interesting point, and we'll see how long strained to avoid falling into the same contradiction of
which she accused Freud in describing an unconscious which cannot be conceived,
only experienced. His hostility to Freud on this point may in part have been based on self recognition.
He also objected to Freud's unconscious on the grounds that it was a negation,
the projected absence of something, the unconscious rather than something substantial in its own right.
Now, this is unfair to Freud.
It was precisely one of the distinguishing characteristics of Freud's unconscious or unbossed sign originally called It Doesn't Work,
but was a sign that was signified by the word consider the difference between.
I unconsciously scratched my head and I scratched my head because something in my unconscious prompted me to do so.
In the first case, unconscious means an absence of consciousness.
In the second, it refers to the contents of the mind, which is not habitually accessed by or indeed accessible to the consciousness.
It was around 1870 that the term unconscious was first used in this more positive way.
But Lawrence wanted to still more substantial bodily kind of unconsciousness,
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.
The word had been around for over a millennium. It is soul.
This word has a checkered history, it developed as a translation of several different concepts,
the Greek panorama or breath as in pneumatic, the Latin genius,
the Latin Spiritus or spirit, the Latin anima, the English word soul became associated with the essence of an individual which could survive death.
But for a long time, it embraced the whole spectrum of consciousness, including the intellect.
But in the 19th century, the soul became particularly associated with the unconscious.
And this neatly fits with the way in which Lawrence uses the term which he does abundantly.
The term also have the advantages for him of being ancient and religious.
He was happy, though, to make it cooperate with modern technological and psychological vocabulary, so, for example, Critch is rather terrible.
Appearance was photographed upon Goodwins soul away beneath her consciousness.
The human soul had been around for a long time, photography for less than a century,
but once it came and supposed that something could be photographed on a soul,
at least in metaphore, Lawrence says that he can't define soul, but nor could a bike define its rider.
Our mistake is to pretend that there is no one in the saddle.
Let me repeat that. He can't define soul, but nor could a bike define its rider.
Our mistake is to pretend that there's no one in the saddle.
In Lawrences time, the term soul was in part the slightly old fashioned and embarrassing term that it is again today,
how many of us in everyday speech uses without self-consciousness the term soul?
There is some of this defensiveness and embarrassment in Lawrence's use of it in a passage in Women in Love.
Those of you who've read this novel will know that it opens with a wedding between someone called Laura and someone called Tibs.
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.
When a friend called Marshall, he is of this at the reception after the wedding,
he scoffs sounds as if you were going to be executed instead of married.
The immortality of the soul. But he fell quite flat.
So Marshall then storms off from the conversation with the comment, Too much bloody soul and talk altogether,
thus neatly anticipating many critics objections to women in love as a whole, too much bloody soul and talk altogether.
Marshall is not an admirable character,
and the ridicule of his scepticism near the novel's beginning lends weight to the novel's many subsequent uses of the term soul.
But it's also worth noting that Lawrence wasn't alone in using it.
The novel is set in the near present and several of the arty intellectual set who were
gathered around a character called her Maione use the term in their conversation.
In fact, it had nearly been made fashionable partly as a result of the craze for Russian literature,
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,
which roughly coincided with the First World War in England.
Many people use the term soul with a capital letter, especially when talking about the Russian.
So now Lawrence, who ridiculed the Russian craze whilst in part taking part in it, never did this.
But it wasn't just the influence of Russian literature which made the term fashionable.
There was in general around the First World War, an interest in England in depth psychology.
This drew not only on modern psychoanalysis, but on Christian theology, non Christian theologies.
There was a lot of interest in Hinduism and various kinds of modern mysticism like theosophy.
This was also the boom time for spiritualism and sciences.
Lawrence was not distinctive, therefore, in being interested in these things, nor did he stand out alone in disagreeing with Freud.
He was distinctive in the particular conclusions he came to.
He wasn't a camp follower and he can't be described as an artist of any kind.
He was a Laurentian and he found followers.
Now, to try and describe what his ideas were, we have to have a slight digression on the mind body problem.
This problem has kept theologians, philosophers and medical doctors in disagreement with each other for as long as their disciplines have existed.
The problem is all mental phenomena, physical phenomena.
And if not, how do mental phenomena relate to physical phenomena?
Dualists give the answer that the mind and the body are separate substances, Plato and Descartes believed this.
There may be causal interactions in one or both directions between them, but they are separate kinds of thing.
The body takes up space. The mind doesn't. Modernists, as the name suggests, hold that there is only one kind of substance,
but they differ as to what this is, idealist modernists believe that everything is mental.
The 18th century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley advocated this view that to be is to be perceived.
The fact that a table is hard or the to white board is white is a mental phenomenon.
Materialist monocytes believe the opposite, that everything is material hobs was a materialist.
Richard Dawkins is one now on this spectrum.
Lawrence is very hard to place.
The fact that there is confusion can partly be explained in terms of his heterodox attitude towards scientific and philosophical language altogether.
He said in Fantasia of the unconscious that science doesn't answer any problems, just sets more with their fingers in their noses.
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,
one that used not just his intellect or his powers of observation, but his whole being.
He called this subjective science, such as he thought the Egyptians and the Greeks had had when science and religion were in accord.
He also says that his science and philosophy come from his literary writing rather than the other way round.
Quote, this pseudo philosophy of mine, and that is his term.
This pseudo philosophy of mine is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse.
Indeed, there is a strong degree of correspondence between Lawrence's non-fiction and his fiction,
which is why, if you're interested in Lawrence, it is very well worth reading the non-fiction to.
So to return to the question of whether Lawrence was a modernist or idealist or something else,
on the one hand, at times he seems to be a dualist, he wrote in a letter to Ernest Smith in 1999.
You were my first live teacher of philosophy.
You showed me the way out of a torturing, crude modernism, past pragmatism into a sort of crude, but appeasing pluralism.
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.
And then again, at times, he sounds like a materialist when he says there is no utterly immaterial existence, no spirit.
The distinction is between living plasm and inanimate matter.
Look at how often he describes rocks as living.
A split in the living rock, or he discusses whether a chair is living or not, but then there can be inanimate matter.
When Gerald dies, his corpse is described as inanimate. It's merely a corpse because of the way he died.
It's not always easy to follow Lawrence. And as I say,
I've been quoting here from several works psychoanalysis in the unconscious fantasy of the unconscious and studies in classic American literature.
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.
This is not the distinction between, let's say, a live rabbit and the corpse of a rabbit.
It is the distinction between something which is spiritually alive and something which has no spiritual existence at all.
Every person has a soul. It is created out of nothing at their conception.
They have a body and they also have a mind or spirit or consciousness who uses those three terms pretty much interchangeably.
The soul is the most important part of the individual and should take control of everything else.
Neither the body nor the mind should be allowed to take charge.
At death, the body sinks towards Earth and is of no further importance, the soul splits into component parts.
And now we're in one of the odder parts of Fantasia of the unconscious.
The soul splits into its component parts and flies towards the sun and the moon.
But it still has a physical nature and it's part of the physical matter of the whole universe.
So far, so confused now because male and female bodies are different, therefore male and female souls are necessarily different.
And this is one issue that cultural feminists, as opposed to those feminists who believe that gender is culturally so,
which is to say, those who believe that gender is culturally determined.
That's one of the issues that they have with Lawrence, that there is a difference between the male soul and the female soul.
In psychoanalysis and the unconscious, he and that amortises the body in terms of spiritual principles,
so the back of the body is connected with the male principle,
the cervical ganglia, the lumbar ganglion and the sacral ganglia, and each has its associated spiritual principles.
The front of the body contains the female principle, the cervical plexus, the solar plexus and the hyper gastric plexus.
Changes in the body are therefore also social changes, as, for example, at puberty, the nose indicates character.
Look at people's body shapes in Lawrence, they're always important,
they always mean something, it's important that Lady Chatterley's Bottom is not small.
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.
Large thighs on men are always suspicious. For Lawrence, just a small bottoms are on women.
Teething hurts us because we've become too spiritual. And before we decide that this is all too odd,
bear in mind that you don't need to be fully versed in this physiological metaphysical psychology in order to read his works,
though some knowledge of it does help. And secondly, Lawrence was writing it at a time at which ideas which are far,
far stranger than any around now, were current, and many of them were, from a modern perspective, repugnant.
So let us say roughly then that for Lawrence, everything is material.
Only some things are spiritually alive.
Electricity for him can be spiritual and is involved in the body precisely as modern scientists believe that it is in women in love.
Harmony at one stage get in a rage with her almost ex lover, Birken,
and tries to kill him by bashing in his skull with a lapis lazuli light paperweight.
He's reading a book and as she stands there holding the paperweight above him, quote, terrible shocks ran over her mind.
His body like shocks of electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck her down.
True, technically, this is a simile, as if many volts of electricity struck her down,
but it is often the case with Lawrences similes that they are interchangeable with literal usage.
He doesn't actually need the as if and on another occasion, he might not have used it.
For example, Burkean describes Japanese jujitsu fighters as possessing a curious kind of full electric fluid like eels, that isn't metaphore.
In Fantasia of the unconscious, successful sex is, quote,
the bringing together of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarised electric blood of the female,
with the result of a tremendous flashing interchange which changes the constitution of the blood and the very quality of being in both.
But there is also an aspect of the human body which is not spiritually important, if someone involuntarily farts, for example, that is meaningless.
It does not indicate degradation of that person's soul. Lawrence, therefore, also distinguishes between two kinds of dream,
there were soul dreams which interpret the soul to itself, but actually he considers those to be a minority of dreams.
He considers the majority of dreams to be merely mechanical, to be produced by, for example, eating too much cheese before bedtime.
And here again is a point of disagreement with Freud, who considered most dreams, if not quite all, to be of deep psychological significance.
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.
He leaves her house and wanders out into the countryside.
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.
Now, this event is presented primarily as a movement of the soul, not as a kind of madness,
having been brought on by virtue of having been biffed on the head after he has had this ecstasy, which is spiritually important.
He takes the train into Nottingham and then he starts feeling really bad.
He has concussion. In other words, he has a week or two in bed.
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.
I think that Lawrence considered his own developing tuberculosis insofar as he allowed himself to think about it at all in these terms,
as spiritually irrelevant as having no connexion to his essential soul.
When he went back in visit to the woman who will become his next lover, Ursula, and he is looking phosphorescent,
he replies to her question, Don't you feel well with I hadn't thought about it.
Ursula responds, You ought to suffer a man who takes as little notice of his body as that.
The narrative itself takes little notice and in the same way is Berkin Lawrence disliked physiologically
determined states and much of his writing can be understood as a struggle to transcend them.
So the bodies should be kept in its place, but the mind should be kept in its place also,
it should not seek to dictate to or diminish the rest of the south, which he calls the spontaneous centres.
The job of control, as I've said before, should be done by the soul.
And especially as anyone who's read the lengthy extracts on your handouts will know,
the mind should not seek to encompass sex in Lawrence's version of The Fall of Man.
And he did a lot of this rewriting of biblical stories, as we'll see see in the third week.
In his version of The Fall of Man, the expulsion from paradise happened because sex was brought into the mind.
Adam and Eve had been happily having sex. What went wrong was when they started thinking about it, then they became ashamed.
Then they knew they were naked. Then they had to make clothes.
Consciousness also inhibits spontaneity and spontaneity is a great good for Lawrence,
he says spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong.
In other words, you shouldn't condemn something because you know it to be wrong,
but because your soul revolts from it in involuntary, spontaneous disgust.
So there were scenes in Lawrence's novels in which characters entirely lose their self-consciousness,
the mind's role has been curtailed, and this is generally good for them.
Again, and Women in Love Burkean wrestles with his best friend, Gerrold naked.
They're both a bit embarrassed by this at first, but they gradually get into it and as they do,
they learn a kind of mutual physical understanding and when they do, they wrestle better.
Eventually they are wrestling swiftly, rapturously, intent and mindless.
At last, Birkins eyes are wide and dreadful and sightless.
Afterwards, when they are panting and recovering Borking comments, one ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close.
It makes one sane. So it follows that the intellect should be kept in check.
Lawrence was working class, the son of a coal miner, and he did share some of the content of his class for the intelligentsia.
Once he'd made some literary friends in London, he had social entry to the academic elite,
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.
He was particularly revolted, that is to say, by the Cambridge mode of homosexuality.
The intellectuals he was most attracted to tended to be anti rationalists, for example, German romantics such as Howdah and Schelling.
In the early 20s, he was of the opinion that most people should never learn to read or write.
By the mid 20s, he had reached the slightly softer opinion that learning should not be forced beyond the three R's,
children should have four hours of teaching a day to the age of 12,
then either technical or academic education, and which a child was to be received, which a child was to receive,
would be determined by aristocrats of the sole who are Lawrences true aristocrats.
In Women in Love, the half intellectual conversation at Homogenise House is presented as malevolent.
It is implicated by analogy in the First World War, which is contemporary with the writing and the setting of this novel.
The talk at Bradley went on like a rattle of small artillery.
It's also implicated in the Satanic. They are all witches helping the pot to bubble.
Ursula is cruelly exhausted by the powerful, consuming, destructive mentality that emanated from the company, it will be.
On the other hand, though,
Lauren seised all of the education that was available to him up to and including a scholarship to University College Nottingham.
And in Women in love, opposition to education is attacked.
So this is on your handouts.
In the third chapter of the novel called Classroom, Úrsula is teaching a primary school class about the structure of catkins.
It was Lawrence's favourite subject by far at school and university botany.
At the end of her lesson, Birken and her Maione walk in to visit her.
Hamani argues against mass education on the grounds that children who are roused to consciousness are crippled in their souls.
She is then fiercely attacked by Birken for saying this Birken bear in mind,
more than any other character in the novel, resembles Laurence Burke and challenges her.
Would you rather for yourself know or not know that the little red flowers are there?
She has no answer. Birkins argument that children are at present imprisoned with a limited false set of concepts
implies that a certain kind of education and a certain kind of discipline would free them.
In other words, Lawrence in this scene uses her mind to repudiate certain tendencies which he recognised in himself.
And in fact, at a later point in the novel, Ursula accuses Burkin of being like her Maione.
This is fair, if you were to read this passage without knowing who was speaking,
everything that Homogenise saying you would get, you would probably guess that it was Burkin.
But then Birken rounds on her for her hypocrisy. But Burkean elsewhere, just like Amaney pronouncers on the desirability of being unconscious,
quote, spontaneously to run or move like a fish in the water.
The mystic conjunction, the ultimate unison between man and woman, a further sensual experience.
Birken To give him credit, though,
is aware of the contradiction involved in these thoughts and even more of the contradiction involved in trying to persuade others of them.
He asks himself. Perhaps you'd been wrong to go to Ursula with an idea of what he wanted.
Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning?
If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfilment?
The two did not agree very well. This always is not, of course, literally true.
He is not always talking about sensual fulfilment, but this does acknowledge the high proportion of the novel which Birken spends in talking,
just as it does the high proportion of Lawrence's life that he spent in writing.
When Ursula accuses Birken of self-contradiction, quote, he turned in confusion.
There was always confusion in speech, yet it must be spoken whichever way one moved.
If one were to move forwards, one must break away through and to know.
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.
Occasionally, he stops his own preaching to practise what he preaches,
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.
He then thinks I was becoming quite dead alive, nothing but a word bag, he said in triumph, scorning his other self.
Yet somewhere far off and small, the other self hovered.
Thus far, I've been describing Birken as a layered character who is aware of his contradictions and therefore
psychologically similar to the kind of character you would find in a 19th century realist novel,
especially perhaps George Eliot, by whom Lawrence was influenced.
But there is an also an aspect to his character which is new and which reminds you that you are,
in fact reading a modernist novel, not a 19th century one.
Lawrence claimed in a letter to Edward Garnett that he that he had found, quote, a different attitude to my characters.
And he's no longer so interested in the what he calls the old fashioned human element in this other aspect of Birkins presentation.
His speech is his action. After all, Burkean isn't real.
He exists only in words whether or not these words are inside speech marks for him or outside of them.
And insofar as Burkean exists in speech exists in language, there is no contradiction in him talking about being unconscious.
This aspect of Birken changes his mind repeatedly throughout the novel, often without any apparent psychological motivation.
So what we have here is not a bildungsroman, the story of the spiritual development of the central character,
but it's Lawrence's repeated attempts to formulate through the voice of a character what it is he believes,
or to use his own terms to the attempts of his consciousness to interpret his soul.
So to give an example of Birkins shifts of position across this novel, which, as I say,
have no obvious external motivation, he starts by extolling sensuality and nothing else.
Then he says that love between a man and a woman is the be all and end all.
Then he rejects love and humanity altogether and imagines an apocalypse fondly.
Then he demands stellar equilibrium between man and woman.
Then he kisses Ursula and agrees that love is enough. Then he rejects love.
Then he thinks of sex as polarisation. Then he wants blood brotherhood with Gerrold.
Then he wants a further sensual experience, or he wants no abstract annihilation.
Or he wants the creative way of proud individuals, singleness or marriage,
or being free in a free place to with a few other people to want in connexion with a man.
Again, Ursula complains that Birken always contradicts himself,
but that's because she's interacting with him as a real person whom she finds frustrating a hypocrite and a bully.
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.
That's what I'm suggesting is new in Lawrences mode of characterisation here.
These two aspects of Birkins character, though, don't quite sit with each other.
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.
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.
Birkins self-criticism also indicates Lawrence's concern about being accused of the same things.
But he and Lawrence feel that the struggle into consciousness of how to live and what the soul is is a necessary struggle.
To alleviate his spiritual malaise. He has to struggle into greater consciousness of soul,
truth as expressed in metaphysical terms as his friend who then became is an enemy, John Middleton.
Murray summed it up. We have to learn through consciousness where and how to be unconscious, learn it and pass it on.
Birken can't live as unconsciously as the simplest, most pleasant like characters in his works or like Ursula's parents, nor should he.
What he should, according to Lawrence, do, is keep his consciousness forever,
listening to his deepest self or his soul and teaching us to do the same.
My final comment comes from an essay Lawrence wrote in 1923 when he was living in Mexico.
It started as a response to Ulysses, which had come out the year before.
And this essay is called Surgery for the novel Hyphen or a Bomb.
Lawrence, in general, was not good at titles. Women in Love is an appallingly bad and misleading title, but this is a good one.
In this essay, Lawrence laments the day when philosophy and fiction were split.
He says that as a result, the novel went sloppy and philosophy went abstract.
Dry philosophy and religion were now too algebraic.
The novel was too emotional. Women in love can be read as emotion and philosophy, striving to come together again.
They strive, I leave it to you to judge how well they succeed.
Thank you.