Friendship as “ Another Kind of Love”

Unlike his characterization of the face-to-face relation, Levinas presents the erotic relationship as lacking an explicitly social dimension. In contrast to the reference which the ethical face-to-face relation has outside itself, the relationship of eros remains closed and impenetrable. If anyone interrupts the society established by lovers, the intimacy of the moment would disappear. Eros depends on the secrecy of the lovers, which is all too easily violated by the intrusion of others. The absolute exclusivity and unsociability of the erotic relation marks one of the differences

between the need in erotic relation and the metaphysical desire with which Levinas characterizes ethics in the face-to-face relation. In eros, any intrusion of others will not lead to anything beyond the destruction of intimacy. In ethics, on the contrary, the presence of the other in the eyes of the one that challenges me from on high is the condition of morality.

In Women in Love, wherein comes Lawrence’s earlier detailed vision for society, Lawrence also repudiates the erotic couples for their seeking to insulate themselves in

“thehorribleprivacy ofdomesticand connubialsatisfaction”(WL 223), which for him leads ultimately to aesthetic complacency and boredom and eventual revulsion.

He calls the present society a “kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist,

meaningless entities of married couples”(WL 223). For Lawrence, closing out the possibilities of other relationships by entering into the socially idealized sanctum of marriage is restrictive and false. In the story Birkin prepares Ursula for a unique love for which there is “no obligation, because there is no standard for action”(WL 301). He insists that, in order not to be “dominated from the outside”(WL 302), they must break the intrusive presence of others in their love relationship.

Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, Birkin is shown to have tried persistently to break the exclusivity of the isolated pair in order to situate their love as “a little freedom with people”(WL 540). As they agree to marry, Ursula plans to get away from everyone, but Birkin sees their friends as necessary to their own love. Their dialogue is a reflective exploration of a way to love among others:

“Iknow,”he said. “But we want other people with us, don’t we?”

“Why should we?”she asked.

“Idon’t know,”he said uneasily. “One has a hankering after a sort of further fellowship.”

“But why?”she insisted. “Why should you hanker after other people?

Why should you need them?”

This hit him right on the quick. His brows knitted.

“Does it end with just our two selves?”he asked, tense.

“Yes—what more do you want? If anybody likes to come along, let them. But why must you run after them?”

His face was tense and unsatisfied.

“You see,”he said, “I always imagined our being really happy with some few other people—a little freedom with people.”(WL 540)

Ursula concurs tentatively but urges him not to run after others. The novel ends in a reprise of this exchange. Ursual asks, “Aren’t I enough for you?”and Birkin replies that “to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too:

another kind of love”(WL 541). Their final words leave the issue open:

“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

“It seems as if I can’t,”he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,”she said.

“Idon’t believe that,”he answered. (WL 541)

Certainly there are evidence and possibility that Lawrence coveted a homoerotic bond in addition to a heterosexual one. Yet this “anotherkind of love”aspired by Birkin might be adequately considered as the ideal of friendship, if we follow Lawrence’s definition of (male) friendship as “a stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex”(SCAL 63). In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence precisely favours friendship as the new consciousness that is forming underneath the old dying consciousness of erotic love, which for him is “the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together, closer, closer together”

(SCAL 74).²⁶ In this sense, Birkin’s argument at the end of this novel highlights the need to break the self-sufficient world by encountering something other than the grasping exclusivity of the erotic love. In “Education of the People,”Lawrence also expresses the ideal of friendship as an additional relationship that might complement the heterosexual marriage. If marriage is “the center of human life,”friendship is

“the leap ahead”(P 655).

Lawrence’s valuation of friendship is based on his demand that true friends avoid the close intimacy that tends to a loss of individual identity, to a confusing of

“I”and “You.” The so-called “brotherly love”refers to the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the dangers of which, for Lawrence, lie in the fact that egalitarian fraternity coalesces all too easily with the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor.

Both lead to a dissipation of the inalienable difference between the self and the other.

For Lawrence, the desire to overcome strangeness of a friend is incompatible with reverence for the mystery that is wholly other. Lawrence’s insistence on the

“intrinsic otherness”between friends aligns him with Levinas, for whom the virtues of friendship, such as fidelity, constancy, endurance and perennity, are often assimilated too quickly and readily into the Greek concept of philia. Philia is defined by

Levinas as reciprocity, as the economic exchange that takes place within what Levinas would refer to as “the economy of the Same,”where the same and the other form a totality. In Levnias’s terminology, the intersubjective relation of philia is ontological and must be demarcated from the ethical relation to Autrui. This is why Blanchot, alluding to Levinas, describes friendship as “the interruption of being”(1997: 112).²⁷ And thus, in Levinas, we appear to have a distinction between philia and the relation to the other, between reciprocity and responsibility, between mediation and

immediacy. More specifically, Levinas’s philosophy radicalizes the role and interpretation of agape. For Levinas, our unchosen origin in an openness to the vulnerability of the Other, to the invocation of their Face, can usefully be understood as a condition of protoagape.

We can compare Levinas’protoagapeic original relation to others with Derrida’s account of the “minimal friendship”that must precede any mutual understanding, a protofriendship that is there before any contingent agreement, contract, or initiative between the parties: “a friendship prior to friendships, an ineffaceable, fundamental, and bottomless friendship”(1988b: 636). For Derrida, following Levinas and Blanchot, the friend comes from on high, in the unfamiliar proportions of infinite and measureless dissymmetry. The friend is what is to come: “Friendship is never a present given, it belongs to the experience of expectation, promise, or engagement.

Its discourse is that of prayer, it inaugurates, but reports nothing, it is not satisfied with what is, it moves out to this place where a responsibility opens up a future”

(1988b: 641). Derrida’s words give a hint to Levinas’s assertion of “asymmetrical”

intersubjectivity which involves a distance or “respectful separation”that

distinguishes this relation from love in any merely affective sense. For them both, all reciprocity reduces to a philia in which others are constructed in our self-image, thereby leveling off the radical alterity that calls us to answer.

For all their valuation of distance and difference in their formulation of

friendship, Lawrence and Levinas are strikingly different in their interpretation of the significance of difference. For Lawrence, difference means distance, being full of the feeling of distance, without feeling bad about one’s superior distance, one’s superiority. Difference is thus the pathos of distance, feeling apart, and it is threatened by the opposite pathos, the Christian-moral-socialist pathos, feeling the same, and feeling-with. Though Levinas similarly holds a critique of the Christian way of sympathy, for him, the self is always on the receiving end of a command from the Other on the highest. His notion of “pathos of distance”is just on the opposite side of Lawrence’s. In this sense, Lawrence’s notion of friendship is more akin to Nietzsche’s “areteic ethics”than to Levinas’s or Derrida’s concern with the

dispossessed among us.²⁸ In other words, while Derrida and Levinas are mainly speaking of the least among us (“the widow, the orphan, the stranger”), and call an affirmation of the other, Lawrence, following the canonical Nietzsche’s love of the future, considers the friend as representing an excess, an overflow of self-affirmation.

For both Nietzsche and Lawrence, we should help our friends achieve excellence, rather than pitying them. Far from requiring an abdication of the self, friendship should demand a strengthening and enhancing of the self.

Therefore, Lawrence’s concern with (male) friendship, which is mostly treated in his leadership novels, is deeply related to his differentiation between the “love”

mode and the “power”mode. What occupies Lawrence in the leadership novels is the way that society at large has been affected by the love-mode. Lawrence observes

that those who stress sexual and familial love destroy the public world. The heroes of these novels seek vital connections with others outside the limiting scope of erotic or marital relationships. Thus, in Aaron’s Rod, Lilly, from whom Aaron seeks a vital male friendship, condemns all forms of selflessness. In his urgency to preach the preservation of the self, Lilly tells Aaron to give up his “love urge,”which will

“destroy the self”(AR 343). The alternative Lilly chooses is “power,”a mode of relationship where the self is not in danger of invasion.

We must either love or rule. And once the love-mode changes, as change it must, for we are worn out and becoming evil in its persistence, then the other mode will take place in us. And there will be profound obedience in place of this love-crying, obedience to the incalculable power-urge.

And men must submit to the greater soul in a man, for guidance: and women must submit to the positive power-soul in man, for their being . . . . I mean a real committal of the life-issue of inferior beings to the

responsibility of a superior being. (AR 345)

With these words, Lawrence has been severely accused as a sexist and protofascist.

Yet it should be noted that, while Lilly argues authoritatively like a fascist, the text, pervaded with his self-contradictory assertions, has done little to support his doctrine of “submission of the inferior to the superior.” A few pages later, Lilly adopts a palatablevaguenessabouttheintegrity ofindividuals:“Ithink every man isasacred and holy individual, never to be violated. I think there is only one thing I hate to the verge of madness, and that is bullying. To see any living creature bullied, in any way,almostmakesamurdererofme”(AR 351). On account of this, it appears difficult to reconcile the choice Lilly offers Aaron with what he has later said about the need to preserve one’s self in isolation. As an ideal of detachment, Lilly at the same time embodies self-aggrandizement, to the extent of promoting a domineering self. In addition to Lilly’s own contradictory articulation, Aaron’s ambivalent

response to Lilly’s solitariness undercuts the validity of this doctrine.

Lilly was alone—and out of his isolation came his words, indifferent as to whether they came or not. And he left his friends utterly to their own choice . . . . He left each to himself, and he himself remained just himself:

neither more nor less. And there was a finality about it, which was at once maddening and fascinating. . . . And yet at the same time Aaron knew that he could depend on the other man for help, may almost for life itself—so long asitentailed no breaking oftheintrinsicisolation ofLilly’s soul. But this conviction was also hateful. And there was also a great fascination in it. (AR 364)

Without offering Aaron full knowledge, Lilly allows Aaron access up to a point in preaching his doctrine of maintaining an inviolable and totally self-responsible

individuality. In reply to Aaron’s question—“And whom shall I submit to?”—Lilly’s answer is: “Your soul will tell you”(AR 347). In such a way, Aaron is left to rely on his own soul instead ofplagiarizing Lilly’sor relying overmuch on Lilly’sability to articulate solutions to his own confusion.²⁹

Likewise, the friendship between Don Ramon and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent can not be conceived in ordinary sense of fraternity and fidelity. Like that between Aaron and Lilly, it is a relationship which is founded on Ramon’s enormous power of self-assertion which compels Cipriano to submission. Cipriano’s

interpretation of their relationship makes it hard to define it in terms of any conventional definition of friendship:

“But you don’t believe in Ramon,”Kate says to Cipriano.

“How not believe? I not believe in Ramon? –Well, perhaps not, in that way of kneeling before him and spreading out my arms and shedding tears on his feet. But I-I believe in him, too. Not in your way, but in mine.

I tell you why. Because he has the power to compel me. (PS 217)

Kate’s reservations in regard to the friendship between Ramon and Cipriano serve further to undermine its substantiality and loyalty. When Cipriano tells her that he is

“Ramon’s man”, Kate mistrusts him: “In the long run he was nobody’s man”(PS 327).

Kate’s intuition is matched by Ramon’s feeling that “Cipriano would betray him”(PS 205). In face of “theproblem of eternal conjunction between two men,”Ramon and Cipriano, despite and also because of their mutual infidelity and disloyalty, “embrace in the recognition of each other’s eternal and abiding loneliness”(PS 237).

Lawrence’s treatment of friendship reminds us of Zarathustra’s assertion— “in one’s friend, one should still honor the enemy”; or in fact, “in one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy”(1978a: 124). Nietzsche’s ranking of friendship as higher than romantic love or Christian agape lies in his interpretation of this relation as agonistic. For him, as it is for Lawrence, it is far better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. In friendship-as-contest, the worth of the contestants depends upon their cultivating that which makes them different. Characteristic of Nietzsche’s “slaves”is the inability to maintain distance and difference.

Correspondingly, we may perceive how friendship forms a unity animated by the dialectic of their pulling in opposite directions in Lawrence’s fiction. For instance, while Birkin proposes deathless brotherhood to Gerald, he at the same time lets his friend to be a sort of “beautiful enemy”to himself. Birkin is both attracted and repelled by Gerald: “There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either love or hate or both”(WL 225 ). Gerald as the man of action, the doer, is the other, the essential criticism of Birkin, all that Birkin the talker is not, which ironically must be why Birkin continually hopes for and seeks a committed friendship with him throughout the novel and why Birkin is so devastated by Gerald’sdeath atits close.

In Kangaroo, Somers and Cooley also show themselves to be worthy antagonists throughout the novel. Cooley the Australian at first sees himself as a disciple of Somers the English writer and initially echoes his most cherished opinions.

But Somers remains aloof, and it gradually becomes clear that the two men are loyal to completely different first principles. Thus Cooley wonders eventually aloud: “you have your own idea of power, haven’t you”(K 122)? While Cooley bursts out with passionate professions of love, Somers proclaims a doctrine that is closely allied to Lilly’s power urge. Somers specifically rejects the old ideal of brotherly affection:

The whole trend of this affection, this mingling, this intimacy, this truly beautiful love, he found his soul just set against it . . . . Yet he wanted some living fellowship with other men . . . but not affection, not love, not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not

blood-brotherhood. None of that. (K 120)

Yet Somers is at the same time reminded that his middle name of Lovat means that

“Love is in your name, notwithstanding”(K 151). What it implies is the recognition of the fact that all social life is inevitably governed by the “merging”compulsions of the psychic life. Put another way, if a man is to fulfill himself through communal activity, he must move into a realm that is defined by love. Somers himself admits that in all his life he “had secretly grieved over his friendlessness”and that he “had had this craving for an absolute friend”(K 153). Up to the end of the novel, the conflicting viewpoints are not reconciled.

Therefore, though detesting what he calls “merging,”Lawrence nevertheless acknowledges that all living things are part of a “continuum, as if all were connected by a living membrane”(P 761). Lawrence suggests that individuality must remain intact. Nevertheless, if our individuality, our isolation, becomes the explicit focus of our attention, it will cease to form the secure underpinning which makes our creative lives possible. On the other hand, convinced that egoism or selfishness is an

inescapable feature of all interpersonal relationship, Lawrence gives a positive interpretation to the necessity of “self-preservation”and “self-enhancing.” But for Lawrence, this “perfected singleness of the individual being”means neither “what is nowadays called individualism”nor the “cheap egotism,”both of which refer to

“every self-conscious ego assuming unbounded rights to display his

self-consciousness”(P 637). Instead, what Lawrence said about the “perfect solitary integrity”achieved through genuine love and friendship is “the recognition of the exquisite arresting manifoldness of being, multiplicity, plurality, as the stars are plural in their starry singularity”(P 638).

Put more precisely, what Lawrence advocates is, in Nietzsche’s terms, the

“noble egoists,”who will bring to love and friendship not coarse selfishness but their ego’s strength, grandeur, and demands for excellence. Both Nietzsche and Lawrence make “contempt”a catalyst for a higher love or friendship, because, according to them, humans are weak and inadequate, and the person who really loves them

despises them as they are and tries to lift them to a higher plane. As Zarathustra puts it, addressing his own soul, “I taught you contempt . . . the great, the loving contempt that loves most where it despises most”(1978a: 114). Only by such constructive despising both of the person loved and of oneself can everyone concerned be made to rise above, and to surpass, the mundane self. However, as Susan Tridgell indicates, one of the dangers of Lawrence’s moral stance is that it may lead to judging others

despises them as they are and tries to lift them to a higher plane. As Zarathustra puts it, addressing his own soul, “I taught you contempt . . . the great, the loving contempt that loves most where it despises most”(1978a: 114). Only by such constructive despising both of the person loved and of oneself can everyone concerned be made to rise above, and to surpass, the mundane self. However, as Susan Tridgell indicates, one of the dangers of Lawrence’s moral stance is that it may lead to judging others