The Dialectic of Knowing

As shown by the above discussion, Lawrence holds a severe attack on the predatory vision, though a further exploration reveals that mind’s eye andsense’s touch converge in his style. Likewise, Lawrence rejects the possessive mode of knowing. In his opinion, “to try to know any living being isto try to suck thelife out of that being . . . . You have to kill a thing to know it satisfactorily. For this reason, the desirous consciousness,theSPIRIT,isavampire”(SCAL 72). Vampire entails significantly a lust for knowledge of another being, an unpardonable sin in Lawrence’suniverse. In “Apocalypse,”trueknowledgeisequated with our awarenessof“the other thing”:

Man has two supreme forms of consciousness, the consciousness that I

AM, and that I am full of power; then the other way of consciousness, the awareness that IT IS, and that IT, which is the objective universe or the other person, has a separate existence from mine, even preponderant over mine. This latter is the way of knowledge: the loss of the sense of I AM, and the gaining of knowledge, or awareness, of the other thing, the other creature. (A 168)

So for Lawrence, to know is to bring something under a concept, to relate it back to me, to make it familiar, to objectify it, and to incorporate it into my own identity. What Lawrence disclaims from the knowing subject—“the loss of the sense of I AM”—recalls what Levinas proposes as “the dethronization of egoism.” The cognitive and representational imperialism of the ego is severely rejected by Levinas in the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, to know is also to reduce something to thesame. “In knowing,which isofitselfsymbolic,isrealized thepassing from the image,alimitation and aparticularity,to thetotality” (OB 64). Levinas is suspicious of the totalization that he believes to be inherent in any attempt to think, to

conceptualize, to systematize, to theorize and hence to know. In knowledge,

Levinas says, oneisin “a relation with whatoneequalsand includes,with thatwhose alterity one suspends, with what becomes immanent, because it is to my measure and to my scale”(1989: 60). The mediation ofone’srelationsto thesingularity or alterity of others through the generality of concepts discovered in oneself is where

“every power begins”(Levinas 1987: 50). But in the exercise of power, there is nothing disturbing. Hence there is no teaching, no production of new ideas.

In contrast to the Platonic theory of knowledge as anamnesis (recollection), which asserts that I already know what I seek to know, and that all knowledge is already contained within myself, for Levinas, the other introduces something new, approaches as radically other, and resists absorption into theI’shabitualreduction of

the alterity of things to itself, through consumption, labor, work, and knowing.

Levinas thus envisages an ethical sensibility that is irreducible to knowledge, when subject and consciousness itself in passivity are shaken by the alterity of the other person. The stark contrast between the ability of not knowing entailed by ethical alterity’s secret encounter and the foundational precept of western knowledge

theory—that subjects can know some objects in the world—shatters the self-returning journey of the knowing subject. Accordingly, ethics in the Levinasian sense does not focus on how moral consciousness discovers the moral imperative within the

constraints of human reason. Rather it seeks the sense of ethics in how human consciousness when encountering the infinite meets the limits of reason, the limits of its representational imperialism.

But a question has been posed by Derrida—how can moral value be conceived in the first place, if it is not cognitive, i.e. if it is not represented in reflective

consciousness? Put differently, how can the encounter with the other become an ethics if this otherness is incomprehensible? How to speak to the other without comprehension? Would this not occasion the grossest misunderstanding? In short, how can one speak about the invocation of the other without neutralizing the relation, and hence transforming it into a form of knowledge? In this sense, Lawrence not only anticipates Levinas’s critique of the imperialist nature of knowledge but provides a critical review of his relentless denunciation of the power of self-knowledge.

Lawrence was certainly, like Levinas, critical of the possessive mode of knowing, and surely he’ll be in accordance with Levinas’s assertion that “thelight that permits encountering something other than the self makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego . . . . And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world”(TO 68). On the other hand, Lawrence also makes clear on so many occasions that the knowing subject must not and cannot be abandoned in the

pursuit of what he called “true knowledge.” Every departure of the self toward the world inevitably involves a return of the self to itself. And Lawrence never fully gives up the Platonic hope of finding the permanent truth of things behind the appearance of everyday existence. Accordingly, characters in his novels are often shown to be torn between a knowing impulse and something which is more powerful but which is not yet known, not realized. If it were realized it would come as words and knowledge, and inevitably as the product of the consciousness, which was somehow a betrayal of life. In short, there is an endless oscillation in Lawrence’s major work between, on the one hand, his assertion of the ability of “not knowing”as a challenge to the possessive internalization of “knowing”, and, on the other hand, his ultimate recognition that the knowing subject’s yearning for a unity and total presence in meaning can never be denied and that no knowledge is possible without being mediated through a reflective consciousness.

Lawrence’s concern with the pursuit of “true knowledge”is manifest in the idea of foreigner and foreignness, which plays a decisive role in The Rainbow. In the Hardy study, Lawrence explainswhathemeansby “life”: “What is the aim of

self-preservation, but to carry us right out to the firing line, where what is is in contact with what is not”(STH 19). That is, in the dynamic interaction between “what is”

and “what is not,”the actuality of“what is”isno longer taken for granted,for“what isnot”has always already constituted the horizon of reality. Life at the moment of such an encounter appears constitutively unfinished and open-ended. It is in this sense that, in The Rainbow, the drive to know the unknown beyond is inextricably linked with the idea of the foreign. Characters are often depicted in doorways, on thresholds,atwindows,“on thebrink oftheunrevealed”(R 186), reaching toward

“theshoreoftheunknown”or“theporch ofthegreatUnknown”(R 189, 191). One character who is the most successful in realizing the vast whole in life is Tom

Brangwen. If Tom has a secret of success, it lies in his receptivity and humble attitude—i.e., his ability to achieve a state of “the loss of the sense of I AM.” This in turn stems from his conviction that he is incomplete, that all things do not in fact radiate from him: “He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something

incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven traveling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the greaterordering”(R 35). Tom has learned to humble himself and because of this humility he is able to respond to what is alien, to a strange foreign woman and to an unknown cosmic order. What the narrator says of Tom concerning his relation with Lydia extends a complex recognition about the nature of knowledge in a human relationship—that“hedid not know her any better, any more precisely, now that he knew heraltogether”(R 91).

On the contrary, from the beginning, Will and Anna know much more about each other than Tom and Lydia, and they talk a great deal more. But their knowledge and words have no power to soften their wills or bring them closer. It is not their distinctiveness that ultimately separates them but their inability to love one another enough to recognize the unsubsumable foreignness inherent in the other being.

Will’spleasure in finding symbolic meaning in ordinary things enrages Anna.

Refusing to treat ordinary objects as symbols, Anna insists on the physical reality of objects and separates them from all symbolic meanings. Laughing at the Lamb as the symbol of Christ, she said derisively,“Whateveritmeans,it’salamb. And Ilike lambstoo much to treatthem asifthey had to mean something”(R 150). Will

countershermockery with insults:“It’sbecauseyou don’tknow anything. . . .

Laugh at what you know, not atwhatyou don’tknow”(R 150). Instead of endorsing eitherAnna’sorWill’sview ofthelamb,thenarratorcomments,“They werevery wellmatched. They would fightitout”(R 152). Dramatizing the deficiencies of

symbolic and realistic ways of knowing in thecouple’squarrel,thenovelworks toward an unstable trembling dialectics of the two. The reader is not invited to side with either Anna or Will. In certain moods, Lawrence would say with Anna that a lamb is only a lamb; yet in others he knows, with Will, that potent associations carry the creature and the world beyond themselves. They are incommensurable yet each is to be known only through the other.

In such a way, Lawrence’s writing generates meaning from a multiplicity of interacting “voices”while subjecting knowing and being to constant testing. In Women in Love, through a kind of rhetorical performance, Lawrence further makes the tension between “knowing”and “not knowing”central to his transgressive art. As has been mentioned above, Lawrence often uses repetition plus variation to alter the meaning of basic concepts that he has compressed into and unfolded from the code words. Words like knowledge and knowing become dialogized in this novel by recurring in various contexts and in the speech of conflicting characters. Knowledge is thus not an entity but a process. For instance, Gudrun’s“knowing”thewedding guestsas“afinished creation”and Gerald as instrumentality is juxtaposed with Birkin’sknowledgeofpotency in “thedeepestphysicalmind”and thelovers’ initiation into mysteries of darkness. Indeed, “not knowing”as a mode of knowing is one of the most recurrent themes in Women in Love. As Birkin tells Ursula , learning not-to-know is the secrete of learning to know: “You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition”(WL 44). What Birkin proposes is a kind of knowledge that seems, for Ursula, to contradict any previous concept of knowledge. Ursula thereby points to the novelty in Birkin’s definition when she asks, “How can you have knowledge not in your head?”(WL 45). Coining the term “dark knowledge,”Birkin eschews all traditional associations, from Plato on, of light with knowledge and truth.

In contrast to this vulnerable mode of (un)knowing, Gudrun always

pre-mediates and contrives her manual/mental knowing. As has been quoted above, on first encountering Gerald, her unspoken thought is an analytical mentalizaiton of herfeeling asshesays“assuredly” to herself:“Ishallknow moreofthatman”(WL 15). Gudrun knows Gerald in the kingdom of touch, yet her touch, unlike that of Ursual which “can neverbetransmuted into mind content,”reduces the unknown to a material essence that can be known and possessed by the will:

She knew. And this knowledge was a death from which she must recover.

How much more of him was there to know? Ah much, much, many days harvesting for her large, yet perfectly subtle and intelligent hands, upon the field of his living, radio-active body. Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge. (WL 332)

Just as she sees things in “too penetrating”light, so does she in no case go halfway in knowing and mastering an object; she is not satisfied until her knowledge becomes exhaustive. Through her love relationship with Gerald, Gudrun reaps the fruits of forbidden knowledge of a man and then throws him away: “Afterall,whatwasthe lover but fuel for the transport of this subtle knowledge, for a female art, the art of pure,perfectknowledgein sensuousunderstanding”(WL 449). Gudrun’s

knowledge eventually finishes Gerald,so thatthereisnothing “unknown,unresolved”

(WL 14) left for her to discover.

Indeed, Gudrun is occasionally depicted as being capable of falling into a state of

“not knowing,”wherein the mind is temporarily suspended and the volition abandoned. However, Gudrun’s ability of “not knowing”is relativized and undermined by other modes of “not knowing”manifest in other characters. For instance, the experience of “not knowing”gone through by Gudrun brings a strikingly different result from that of the encounter between Birkin and Ursula. At the mare

scene, while Ursula responds with violent antagonism, calling Gerald a fool and urging him to let the mare retreat from the train, Gudrun looksathim “with black-dilated,spellbound eyes”(WL 169). And as Gerald persists she approaches a stateofmindlessness:“ItmadeGudrun faintwith poignantdizziness,which seemed to penetrateherheart”(WL169). At the most intensive moment, “Theworld reeled and passed into nothingnessforGudrun,shecould notknow any more”(WL170).

What Lawrence presents here is another version of the ecstatic loss of self, but also a demonic one. Like, say, the ecstatic moments gone through by Tom Brangwen, Gudrun’s state of “not knowing”follows a pattern of unendurable intensity and mindless release. But unlike Tom’s experience, which follows the subsequent (if temporary) achievement of peace and harmony, Gudrun is much more diffident and detached when returning to normal consciousness—“hard and cold and indifferent” (WL 171). While briefly losing herself in a moment of intensity, Gudrun eventually refuses to admit the experience fully to her conscious mind after it passes, and returns to a cold state of control: “Shewon’tgiveherselfaway—she’salwayson the

defensive”(WL 172). In other words, although she experiences a suspension of her self similar to that felt by Ursula with Birkin, Gudrun resents and resists its existence and its impact upon her.

In addition to Gudrun, Lawrence’s critique on the vampire lust for knowledge is most evident in his presentation of Hermione’s characteristic mode of knowing.

Hermione depends heavily upon one or two elements of being— will, spirit, and intellect are fused within her into a single passion for final abstract knowledge. For Hermione, to know is the greatest thing in life. Driven by a will to know which eats up everything including herself, Hermione is“pallid and preyed-upon like a ghost, like one attacked by the tomb-influences which dog us. And she was gone like a corpse,thathasno presence,no connection”(WL 89). The desire to know thus

consigns one to an experience in which the distinction between predator and prey becomes blurred. On the one hand too-sure, on the other entirely lacking, Hermione, paralleling Gudrun in this sense, is a figure suspended between identities, utterly dependent yet also overpoweringly dominant. The root of the vampiric knowledge as it is manifest in Hermione is the desire to be too close, to close the gap, to drink in and to absorb. Lacking boundaries, Hermione subsumes otherness with (her)self, or (her)self with otherness.

Yet to say that Hermione uses her mind to deny herself life is not equivalent to saying that her deficiencies are simply the result of the mind. The point is that she has put the mind to bad use. As everything is clarified through facts and the

application of intellect alone, and all knowledge is neatly packaged “in anutshell,”an individual’sinstincttowardsexperiencing theunknown and themysteriousbecomes gradually eroded. Instead of being capable of independently arriving at a conclusion, Hermione looks to external sources for answers, and becomes reduced to parroting the ideal concepts. If people live according to taught, idealized, mental concepts of what they should desire and how they should be passionate about it, then they are living aesthetically sterile and barren lives. Refuting Hermione’s indictment that “it is the mind . . . that is death,”Birkin asserts that people lead a death-in-life “not because they have too much mind, but too little”(WL 45). The object of Birkin’s attack here is not thought but thoughtlessness—not mind, but mindlessness—for to “stick to an idea is to become stupid”(STH 197), which is the result of being thoughtless and mindless. The problem with the individual in the modern world is not that he has an ideaofhimself,butthatheinsistson “persisting in some fixed idea of himself”(K 263). Such persistence is part of what Lawrence criticizes as our habitual insistence on the known, on that which lies static and established.

Another example of leading a life with “too little mind”is Gerald. Unlike

Gudrun and Hermione, who bear curiosity for everything and hold an exhaustive mode of knowing, Gerald feels meaningless and defaced. But like Gudrun, he sees the meaning of knowledge only in its instrumentality; and like Hermione, he reduces the dangerous unknown with intellect. Due to a submission to the mechanical order, Gerald found humanity very much alike everywhere. With an attitude of diffidence, carelessness, and arrogance, he considered that he himself can “know”better than the others:

He felt that he, himself, Gerald, had harder and more durable truths than any the other man knew. He felt himself older, more knowing. It was the quick-changing warmth and versatility and brilliant warm utterance he loved in his friend. It was the rich play of words and quick interchange of feelings he enjoyed. The real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better. (WL 59)

The assumption that the real content of the words does not matter leads Gerald

conversely to have easy recourse to conceptual stereotypes, not only in expressing his views,butalso in understanding other’swords. In the chapter called “The Industrial Magnate,”thenarratorsays,“Withoutbothering to think to a conclusion, Gerald

conversely to have easy recourse to conceptual stereotypes, not only in expressing his views,butalso in understanding other’swords. In the chapter called “The Industrial Magnate,”thenarratorsays,“Withoutbothering to think to a conclusion, Gerald