Part Two Love as Ethical Relation to Alterity

Part Two Love as Ethical Relation to Alterity

There we are, together and apart at the same time, and free of each other, and eternally inseparable.

--- D. H. Lawrence

For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. Knowing the breach between us, the uncloseable gulf, I in the same breath realize her

features. --- D. H. Lawrence

It is in eros that transcendence can be conceived as something radical, which brings to the ego caught up in being, ineluctably returning to itself, something else than this return. --- Emmanuel Levinas

The self is non-indifference to the others.

--- Emmanuel Levinas

The other is absolutely other only if he is an ego, that is, in a certain way, if he is the same as I.

--- Jacques Derrida

In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy.

--- Frederic Nietzsche

Superior to love of neighbor is love of those far away, those in the future.

--- Frederic Nietzsche

Chapter One Ethics of Eros

Levinas regards eros as radical transcendence. By the same token, erotic love in Lawrence’s fiction serves as a way of encountering the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of human consciousness. Yet unlike Levinas, Lawrence does not exclude sexuality from the domain of ethics; he elaborates an ethics of eros in his concern with embodied love and language of feeling. Besides, the evasiveness and double-edgedness inherent in Lawrence’s erotic discourse have prevented sexuality from being trapped by the language meant to free it.

I. Eros as Absolute Alterity¹

In his early work, Levinas views eros as occurring in the space between self and other, wherein eros disrupts the familiarity of enjoyment and possession, breaking the circle one established among the things one enjoys in relation to oneself. In reading Proust’s novel, Levinas claims that Marcel’s insatiable curiosity about Albertine is love because it is nurtured by a recognition of the other as separate:

Ontologically pure, this Eros is not a relation built on a third term, such as tastes, common interests, or the conaturality of souls, but has a direct relation to something that both gives and refuses to give itself, namely to the Other as Other, the mystery. (1989: 164)

In the erotic relation, as Levinas describes it, the other has the capacity to remain other in the face of the same: “It is in eros that transcendence can be so conceived as something radical, which brings to the ego caught up in being, ineluctably returning to itself, something else than this return”(EE 96). As such, transcendence will be accomplished in the erotic relation to the other because it is a flight toward the other that does not involve a return to the self. In eros, the relation to the other is a relation

with what “slips away from the light”(TO 86), with what escapes comprehension and understanding.² Here one encounters an alterity that cannot be reduced to an object of consciousness—i.e., that does not seem to come from the self. As Levinas memorably puts it, the caress in erotic relation “knows not what it seeks”(TO 89).

The seeking of the caress does not degenerate into contact that would represent the ego’s hold upon the other. In effect, the caress is a relationship to the other in which the relationship does not diminish the distance between the terms and the distance does not prevent the possibility of a relation. In a nutshell, there is no ultimate teleological principle in the erotic relation.

However, are the lovers not also beings? Doesn’t the caress also involve the possibility that the other does come from the I, and is a construction of the ego’s fantasy? There is a sense in Levinas’s early works that one can find in the erotic relation an “exception”to being. While this sense of transcendence as an escape or a

“way outside of being”persists to some extent in Totality and Infinity, it is qualified there by a deeper recognition of the problematic status of any “outside.”

Fundamental to Levinas’sprojectin Totality and Infinity is the claim that there is a significant distinction between need and desire: “In need I can sink my teeth into the real and satisfy myself in assimilating the other; in Desire there is no sinking one’s teeth into being, no satiety, but an uncharted future before me’( TI 117). In other words, when the subject experiences need, the relation between the I and what it needs can be described in terms of a lack. In order for a need, such as hunger, to be satisfied, that which confronts me as other —the food from which I live, the air I breathe —undergoes a transformation of which I am master. On the contrary, desire is a rupture of solipsistic existence and exposure to infinity through the

acknowledgment of an other whose alteriy cannot be overcome. Therefore, as Levinas puts it,“Desiredoesnotcoincidewith an unsatisfied need;itissituated beyond satisfaction and nonsatisfaction”(TI79).

Put another way, in Levinas’s philosophical work, one finds an increasing insistence on the maintenance of the distinction between eros and ethics. On the one hand, eros instigates a movement of transcendence toward the Other, but at the same time it “throws us back this side of immanence itself”(TI 254). The love peculiar to eros is a relation with the Other—a relation of what Levinas calls the “metaphysical desire”—but it is also a relation which is fatally infected with the tendency to turn back into need because metaphysical desire in erotic love turns all too easily into sensual concupiscence. Said differently, the “ambiguity of love”is due to its being a relation with the other that “turns into need”even as it “presupposes the total,

transcendent exteriority of the other”(TI 254). On account of this, Levinas defines love as an “enjoyment of the transcendent,”that is, as the appropriation of that which transcends every grasp:

An enjoyment of the transcendent almost contradictory in its terms . . . the possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity . . . . This simultaneity of need and desire, of concupiscence and transcendence . . . constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence. (TI 255)

To define love as an enjoyment of the transcendent is to define it by essential

equivocation. Hence love both transcends and does not transcend; it is both like and unlike ethics. The problematic announced in the ambiguity of love is one that increasingly occupies Levinas’s thought. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas solves the problematic by proposing the fecund resolution of eros in paternity that overcomes the threat of need, voluptuosity and immanence: “The profanation thatviolatesasecret.. . discoversthechild”(TI267). Transcendence,ormetaphysicaldesire,would be a ceaseless movement towards exteriority, towards the Other, while eros, for Levinas, completes a circular movement back to the self in its seemingly inevitable

transformation into the satisfaction of a need. This eros, affective eros, must be

overcome in the name of both transcendence and ethics. As it is, the ultimate meaning of eros for Levinas lies in fecundity, in the production of the child.

Levinas’s refusal to contemplate the divinity of physical love is the core of Irigaray’s critique on him.³ Obviously the importance of Levinas for Irigaray is his refusal to submit otherness to the demands of logic. Her adoption of Levinas’s theory of alteriry in her own elaboration of sexual ethics follows from this insistence that erotic intimacy is necessarily an unmediated encounter with an entirely different other. She sees that for Levinas “thetouch ofthe caress”leavestheotherintacteven while seeking its alterity. The Levinasian caress respects the other as other. On the other hand, Irigaray challenges Levinas for the way he sublimates erotic love. This (masculine) sublimation of eroticism prevents Levinas from seeing an expression of divinity in the act of love itself. In Irigaray’s opinion, Levinas’s discussion of passion is trapped in the deadly circle of sublimation and debasement, the disjunction between the spiritual creation and degraded eroticism of the flesh. “It is surely a question of the dissociation of body and soul, of sexuality and spirituality”(ESD 15).

To exit the vicious circle and disjunction, Irigaray redefines ethical passion as

“erotic wonder”(ESD 13) which ensures the everlasting sense of novelty between the lovers without subordinating the passionate erotic body to spiritual love.⁴ As it is, wonder is the place of lovers’second birth—“a birth into a transcendence, that of the other, still in the world of the senses, still physical and carnal, and already spiritual”

(ESD 82). In other words, “wonder would be the passion of the encounter between the most material and the most metaphysical, of their possible conception and fecundation one by the other”(ESD 82). For Irigaray, the redefinition of ethical passion as erotic wonder escapes the pitfalls of both moral masochism and

disembodied sublimation. “Wonder goes beyond that which is or is not suitable for us . . . . That which precedes suitability has no opposites”(ESD 74). Her point is that wonder, the astonishment provoked by the totally other as the first passion,

precedes the very opposition of pleasure and unpleasure, and, by extension, precedes Levinas’s distinction between narcissistic enjoyment and ethical anguish. In contrast to Levinas’s proposition of overcoming sensual enjoyment by bringing the birth of

“the child,”Irigaray suggests that the erotic creation consists in the rebirth of the lovers brought forth by their “bestowing life on each other”:

Prior to any procreation, the lovers bestow on each other—life. Love fecundates both of them in turn, through the genesis of their immortality.

They are reborn, each for the other, in the assumption and absolution of a definitive conception . . . . They love each other as the bodies they are.

(ESD 190)

Accordingly, wonder, no longer reserved only for God, may also be an experience of carnal wonder and lovers can finally get rid of (patriarchy’s) obsession with

procreation.

Both Levinas and Irigaray, by taking corporeality into consideration, look for a down-to-earth supplement to traditional philosophy which is concerned only with conceptual logics. By contesting the purification of ethical imperatives from all

“pathological passions,”Levinas departs from the Kantian legacy in his emphasis on the ethical significance of passion and embodiment. The originality of Levinas’s contribution to contemporary work on the body lies in the fact that it enables the elaboration of the ethical significance of flesh and, by extension, opens a possibility of an ethics of eros. Yet this possibility is never fully realized in Levinas’s own work since his own conception of eros remains entangled in metaphysical traditions. The radical potential of Levinas’s work is undercut at the moment it confronts sexuality.

In other words, while admitting passions into the realm of ethics, Levinas dissociates those passions from any relation with sex, and in this sense, he himself repeats the classical Kantian gesture of purification. In order to maintain the separation of ethics from sexuality, Levinas even reduces the ethical significance of passion to

“pain.”⁵ Like Levinas and Irigaray, Lawrence considered erotic love as a way of encountering the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of human consciousness.

Nonetheless, in stark contrast to Levinas’s rejection of sensual enjoyment, the depiction of erotic love in Lawrence’s fiction restores to sexual pleasure its status of creation. Hence eros in Lawrence prevents the degradation of sexuality, which is evident in Levinas work—“thecomplacent pleasure of dual egoism”(TI 266).

Without excluding sexuality from the domain of ethics, Lawrence elaborates an ethics of eros in his concern with the creation of a new language of feeling and love.

II. Embodied Love and Language of Feeling

Previous discussion in this study concerning Lawrence’s treatment of seeing, knowing and the self reveals that his special, and characteristic, gift was an

extraordinary sensitiveness to the “unknown modes of being.” Lawrence could never forget the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man’sconsciousmind. He always talks about the need to let go. One is reborn not by taking thought, but by letting go—by a fall into the future, or a movement to the edge of consciousness. For Lawrence, erotic love is one of the means of bringing forth a leap into the unknown world of the other. The significance of the erotic experience was just that, in it, the immediate knowledge of divine otherness is brought to a focus. Erotic intensity spells the destruction of the mastering subject, the

annihilation of consciousness, the loss of sovereignty and individuality. Norman Mailer asserts that, for Lawrence, the ideal impulse of love lies in the intrinsic power of lovers to get beyond their ego, will, and self: “Sexual transcendence, some ecstasy where he could lose his ego for a moment, and his sense of self and his will, was life to him—he could not live without sexual transcendence”(112).

The overwhelming role of erotic wonder in The Rainbow precisely indicates how erotic ecstasy is the direct means for such transcendence in Tom and Lydia:

A daze had come over his mind, he had another center of consciousness.

In his breast, somewhere in his body, there had started another activity. It was as if a strong light were burning there and he was blind within it, unable to know anything, except that this transfiguration burned between him and her, connecting them, like a secret power. (R 33)

Being pregnant with ecstasy, the activity produces a sense of drifting, which in turn entails loss of will and loss of identity. Halfway between sense and nonsense, between clarity and obscurity, eros evinces not so much a duality as a thoroughgoing ambiguity. “Theirnew lifecameto pass,itwasbeyond allconceiving good,itwas so good, that it was almost like a passing away, a trespass”(R 41). In The Rainbow, the whole sense of otherness was most significantly focused in the erotic relation.

Both Tom and Lydia take a great risk because neither can possess or know the other.

The effect of eros, then, is to recast a subject, who has learned to control its work and achieved mastery of itself, back into a state of flux where the borders of self and other, of the I and the world, are no longer so clear, where the gap between the I and the other is not so well-defined, nor so easily grasped.

As such, in eros, the truths and certainties of the world, the will to mastery and control, are suspended. This kind of suspension of conscious mind in erotic love is especially true in Women in Love where a tactile erotics insisting on the alterity of the flesh of the other replaces a visual erotics that subsumes the flesh into a numinous image or sign. As has been indicated in Part One, the identificatory gaze loses its primacy in Lawrence’s fiction; blind touch-awareness is instead the primary mode of erotic encounter. In this new dispensation, the hand (as opposed to the eye) is the chosen organ of operation. Dissociated from the desire to identify, eros is troped as an invisible but all-pervasive force that regulates the attraction between love-objects

without their active assertion or interference. Birkin’s“soft,blind kisses... perfect in theirstillness”(WL 187) announce the presence of a new, non-visual, tactile and desire-free erotics. Birkin prefers the secret invisibility of the anus to the

high-profile visibility of phallic erections. His esoteric love-making with Ursula in Sherwood Forest represents a remarkable attempt to give cosmic resonance to an anal-erotics. The erotic engagement between Birkin and Ursula is “neverto beseen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness”(WL 320). Attuned to the cosmic vibrations, the lovers receive“the maximumsofunspeakablecommunication in touch”(WL 320).

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the blocking of ocularcentric consciousness is especially apparent in the representation of Mellor’s and Connie’s erotic encounters.

In this novel, Lawrence severely renounces modern love which he defines as “the self-seeking, automatic civilized man trying to extend hisego overawoman”;and it isthewoman,“putting herwilloverhim,and thereby getting asenseofpowerand enlargementin herself”(JTLJ 105). The sexual love experienced by Connie, before she meets Clifford, offers a practical example of what Lawrence hates about the

“modern love.” Her lovemaking at that time is characterized by an urgent need to articulate spurious concepts of will even amid the sweat of sex. Indeed, on these terms, the bed becomes her willful kingdom, where she can rule easily with new transactions of mastery over an unvarying inferiority in her lover. “Rather she could use this sex thing to havepoweroverhim”(LCL 40). Such an illustration of

Connie’sdominantmode ofloving tendsto confirm Michaelis’slatercomplaint about her sexual gamesmanship. Yet he approves this modern erotics of will and ambition because the adulterated sex shields him from the Lawrentian “lapsing out”that he fears and Connie cannot as yet imagine.

On the contrary, in describing Connie and Mellor’s lovemaking, Lawrence asserts that erotic love not only gives rise to, but also should be based on, the

abandonment of acquisitive ego. In fact, the first two scenes of their sexual act are still largely dominated by Connie’s resisting ocularcentric consciousness. But in the scenes that follow, the concept of character shifts from a self constituted by a

personality, persona, or ego to a self founded on bodily, impersonal forces and

responses. The characters are not so much the persons named Connie and Mellors as their impassioned bodies. Mellors is throughout the novel linked to a variety of organic phenomena in order to establish a connection between human and nonhuman vitality. The woods where he lives is a place where “primroses are broad, and full of pale abandon,”where “columbines were unfolding their ink-purple riches,”where everywhere there were “bud-knots and the leap of life”(LCL 177)! In the love scenes in the woods, the acquisitive ego in both Connie and Mellors is put to rest and the language Mellorsusesto describeConnie’sbody isasregenerativeasthenature that surrounds the couple. The “points of brilliance”in Connie are neither her eyes’

single point of view, nor the sun’s brilliant light, but her vital body’s multiple, dynamic points of feeling and inner brilliance (LCL 183). The hand’s blindness enables it to operate without ocular interference.

Lawrence’s depiction of erotic love in his fiction gives a hint to Levinas’s designation of eros as transcendence toward the other, but it also marks where they depart from each other. While both Levinas and Lawrence lay stress on erotic passions, they are divided on the locus and nature of these passions. As has been indicated above, the erotic experience of alterity is sought out by Levinas as the indefinable excess that escapes the subject, and which could not be located, fixed, and given form. The anarchy of eroticism is not only a power of disorder or loss, but rather, a simultaneously needful/desirable disruption of any ontological project at all.

And yet, unable to imagine an ethics of sexuality, Levinas fails to consider an ethical encounter in “embodied love”; instead, he makes the lovers eventually turn toward the transcendent God by conceiving a child. For Levinas, love must desire immortality,

and procreation is the nearest thing to perpetuity and immortality that a mortal being can attain. The physical or the sexual, given that it leads inevitably to nourishment and enjoyment, which are “the transmutation of the other into the Same”(TI 111), should not be disavowed but must be properly channeled. Hence Levinas’s distinction between erotic and non-erotic love (or between eros and love) is at the same time sublimation of the sensuous or the physical in a philosophical-spiritual realm, or the overcoming of the ontological ambiguity of love.

On the contrary, procreation is for Lawrence the accidental tribute to erotic love, and he never regards sexual desire and pleasure as the worm at the core of love.

Instead, he stresses the inviolable primacy of physical love and sexual pleasure, apart from procreation:“Buttheact,called thesexualact,isnotforthedepositing ofthe seed. Itisforleaping offinto theunknown”(P 441). While for Levinas

concupiscence is bad since it inevitably involves a return to self, for Lawrence, the erotic creation consists in the rebirth of both lovers generated by the transformation of the flesh itself, as we may see in the “transfiguration”burned between Tom and Lydia.

In The Rainbow, the trope of death and rebirth occurs particularly in reference to coitus. A sexual encounter like the first one between Tom and Lydia involves first his“obliteration,”“sleep,”“oblivion”and then hisreturn,“gradually,butnewly created, as after a gestation, a new birth,in thewomb ofdarkness”(R 33). While Levinas remains within a reproductive paradigm, for Lawrence, as it is for Irigaray, the erotic caress speaks of a regeneration in the body that is other than the maternal body of sexual reproduction. Lettie in The White Peacock is accused of failing to accept that the physical body does count for more than mere procreation. Clifford is especially one of Lawrence’s targets in his critique of modern men’s subordination of sexual love to procreation. Clifford insists that sex should be subordinated to preserving the long life. He wants an heir to his property and name and he doesn’t care about sexual love: “‘So why not,’he asks Connie, ‘arrange this sex thing, as we

arrange going to the dentist’”(LCL 191)?

More specifically, Lawrence’s quarrel with traditional conceptions of love consists mainly in his critique of romantic idealization, which tends to spiritualize passion so as to play down physical bodies. In his earlier novels, Lawrence describes a lot about what he calls “the dreaming woman”who “isso ready to disclaim thebody ofaman’slove”(WP132). Thus for Helena in The Trespasser, a kiss is the supreme experience: “She belonged to that class of ‘Dreaming Women’

with whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. Her desire was accomplished in a real kiss”(T 64). For Lawrence love is pure and whole only when it develops naturally and simultaneously on the sensual plane and yet Helena experiences her sexuality as “sex in the head”: “The secret thud, thud of his heart, the very self of that animal in him she feared and hated, repulsed her. She struggled to escape”(T 125).

Helena hence tends to yield her passion to her lover as a kindness, a sacrifice.

Siegmund is quite aware of his own sexual desire and is not tempted to idealize it.

Yet this desire, largely through continual thwarting, has become distorted and

ambivalent: “Sometimes he would feel a peculiar jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held her hand. Occasionally it was almost painful, and felt as if a little virtue were passing out of his blood. Butthathedismissed asnonsense”(T 155). Certainly Lawrence himself would not dismiss it as nonsense. He knows that the virtue is in the blood and idealization of love is the evil. His frank erotic

manifestoes emphasized blood consciousness, instinct and passion.

By exalting embodied love, Lawrence puts himself passionately against what he called the cerebralization of feeling. In his attack on modern love, Lawrence laments that even passion and desirebecomementalidealsin us. Weend up by getting “our sex into ourhead”and themostbasic,naturalsensualattraction becomesamental experiment. In other words, the natural, spontaneous attraction between lovers becomesreduced to a“functioning ofthehead.” In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the

narrator emphasizes Connie and her sister’s logocentric preference for intellectual discourse over sex. Words are so important to Connie and Hilda that they require verbalengagementbeforethey can besexually aroused,forneitheris“even in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is, unless they were profoundly interested in TALKING to oneanother”(LCL 4). The sisters’livesare so shaped by verbal intercourse that their sexual encounters can be seen as textualized:

“And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter”

(LCL 4). For the sisters, there is no spontaneity, no unpredicitability, and the whole erotic process is prescribed, set under way by language. Sex-after-talk is as

inevitable as effect-after-cause in a scientific experiment. After marrying to Clifford, who joins with his intellectual friends in derogating the importance of unharnessed passion in lovemaking, Connie wastes away listening to tired, bruised, and pretentious men denigrate sex with their self-serving and escapist discussions.

And it follows that, passion and desire, as preconceived ideals about love, are superimposed mechanically and individuals then attempt to squeeze themselves into those predetermined molds. The inevitable and unenviable consequence will be distortion and conflict and disharmony instead of creative and fulfilling love.

Lawrence was often criticized for his extreme and abnormal attitudes toward sex, but his own definition of abnormality is worth mentioning:

Abnormal sex comes from the fulfilling of violent or extreme desire, against the will. It is not the desires which are wrong, nor the fulfillment . . . but the fixed will in ourselves, which asserts that these things should not be, that only a holy love should be . . . . It is the labouring under the burden of self-repudiation and shame which makes abnormality. And repudiation and shame come from the false doctrines we hold. (LIII 140-1)

Lawrence’s critique is that we have built our world so scrupulously that there is scarcely anything in it unfamiliar to our mental consciousness:

Convenience! Convenience! There are convenient emotions, and inconvenient ones. The inconvenient ones we chain up, or put a ring through their nose. The convenient ones are our pets. Love is our pet favorite. And that’sasfarasoureducation goes,in thedirection of feelings. We have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not even exist for us. (STH 202-3)

The“convenience”with which wekeep ouremotionsdoesnotmean thefacility with which we can consciously manipulate them; on the contrary, it implies our subjection to the moral system which turns out to be the real agent of our emotions, and which deceives us into believing they are genuinely ours. “Love”becomes a convenient emotion for us and hence theword “love”had lost its subversive meaning by being sterilized through non-regenerative repetitions. Inhisessay “TheNoveland the Feelings,”Lawrence claims that our modern society ignores the health of our feelings and Lawrence tried to tell us why reading novels is so important—it helps “cultivate our feelings”(P 758).

On account of this, Lawrence’s approach to love in his fiction is inseparable from his increasing impatience with the deadening effect of cliché. Over the years Lawrence’s moralizing about the need for a revolution in the language of love seems itself to have become clichéd, but in its time it was original and bold. In Women in Love, Birkin urges on Ursula the author’s own philosophy: “‘The point about love,’he said . . . ‘is that we hate the word because we have vulgarized it. It ought to be . . . tabooed from utterance, for many years, till we get a new, better idea’”(WL 122).

Ursula begs him, “Say you love me, say ‘my love’to me”(WL 151). Birkin fights the cliché: “I love you right enough . . . but I want it to be something else . . . We can go one better”(WL 151). She insists that there is nothing better and again

pleads. He concedes grudgingly: “Yes—my love, yes, my love. Let love be enough then. I love you then—I love you. I’m bored by the rest”(WL 152).

Lawrence’sproblem asawriterwasto putinto wordsthesefeelingsand perceptions which he believed to be independent of the conscious intellect. He often uses words strongly reminiscent ofBirkin’sto convey hisconceptoftheaestheticasa“lapsing out”oftheconsciousself.

In his attempt to describe such kind of experience of “lapsing out,”Lawrence appeals to erotic desire, which for him is “whatis not said”—i.e., what is excluded by established values and what exceeds the category of the knowable and the sayable.

By daring to write about the unspeakable, Lawrence is also representing the unrepresentable, hence calling into question the clichés and complacencies of common sense, the taxonomies of Enlightenment culture. The chapter called

“Excurse”in Women in Love is the section where Lawrence is obviously taking a great novelistic risk. Hemustputinto the“agitations”of speech, into the

“movements”of thought, a state about which there may be nothing to say except that it is inaccessible to whatever might be said or thought:

There were faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance . . . the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night. (WL 403) In such a way Lawrence makes an attempt to put something of this state into words, although he has to rely on such apparently self-canceling expressionsas“physical mind”and “mystical nodality of physical being”(WL 403) to suggest the literally unspeakable nature of erotic love.

Hence Lawrence exhausts the language of sexuality to return that language to the

area where he had always argued it belonged—to the darkness, to silence, to oblivion.

Darkness and silence—the appropriate leitmotif for books which challenge the Enlightenment confidence in reason and language—refer not only to that in human experience which is irrational but to that which is unsayable. Even after her

happiness over simultaneous orgasm with Mellors in an erotic scene, Connie is still a victim of the conditioned need to find the verbal counterpart for her sexual excitement.

She looks for praise and explanation through the Word. And yet she is warned by Mellors to let the instincts, not the words, confirm the experience. Later she finally has absorbed the value of the special silence that is the result of instinctual satisfaction:

“And hewasstillwith her,in an unfathomablesilencealong with her. And ofthis they would neverspeak”(CLC 178). In contrast to Clifford who transforms

everything into words, Mellors is the potent man who leads Connie to learn to speak about love in silence.

And yet, while Mellors attempts to be silent, by withdrawing from the world of men, but without touch he was drawn back into the world, into language. The great attempt of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is to re-create in words the act of love itself, but finally Lawrence recognizes that such re-creation is inadequate, for if Connie and Mellors are together, the ink could stay in the bottle. And so Mellors writes in his final letter to Connie: “So many words, because I can’t touch you. If I could sleep with my arms round you, the ink could stay in the bottle”(LCL 312). The

description of Connie and her sister’s textualization of sex mentioned above implicitly calls readers’attention to be aware of how sex is also textualized in the novel.

Another paradox is manifest in Women in Love. Despite his own severe remarks on

“sex in the head”, Birkin’s “struggle into conscious being”commits him to a new articulacy in the emotional realm. The paradox is that his increasing insistence on the sub-conscious realm accompanies a heightened need for conscious articulacy.

Lawrence attacks on the substitution of sex talk for actual sex. But no matter how

deep his suspicion of words, they are essential even to his sacred blood knowledge.

Put differently, erotics in Lawrence’s fiction reveals the tension between the need to rescue sexuality from secrecy, to bring it into discourse, and the simultaneous

recognition that the re-creation of sexuality in language must always, at the same time, resist language.⁶

Writing at a time when sexual discourse was vigorously censored, Lawrence benefited from the symbolic indeterminacy inherent in “extremity”which pushes readers beyond the empirical referent. On the other hand, when the extreme

becomes the norm, this proliferation of non-empirical meanings stops. Therefore, in his attempt to release what is repressed, Lawrence also confronts the danger of what Foucault’s analysis of “repressive hypothesis”has predicted.⁷ While the discourse of and on eros points to its subversive role in ethics, when so widespread, this discourse tames, appropriates, disseminates, and eventually deprives eros of its subversive powers. Explicit discourses on erotic desire might replace it with logos (or with language). In other words, when a taboo is widely talked about, it disappears, stops being a taboo, and becomes one of many discourses. Nonetheless, as we might see in the following discussion, Lawrence’s erotic discourse proves to be double-edged and self-critical, hence preventing itself from being domesticated. In her reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Blanchard claims that readers have tended to ignore

Lawrence’s concern with the limits of language, perhaps from fear that it will

somehow lessen the significance of Lawrence’s role as priest of love: “But to see that Lawrence is both creating a language of the feelings and simultaneously calling into question the adequacy of that language is to see the very brilliance of the novel”(1992:

133). In other words, Lawrence has not only created a language of love, a lover’s discourse, but has also shown the limits of such a discourse, even at its most eloquent.

To understand such kind of text is to recognize the self-critical dimension to his erotic discourse.

III. Evasiveness in Erotic Discourse

Due to the sexual explicitness in his fiction, Lawrence is often accused of

“privilegingthe body over the mind”(Belsey 33), and hence sustaining dualism for reversing the Cartesian hierarchy. Indeed, in some of his work, “blood

consciousness”seems to be not only its own authorization but the center of

consciousness. For instance, in The Rainbow, the sight of Lydia grips Tom “in his bowels”(R 33). His adopted daughter Anna and her husband Will are as estranged as her parents, so sexual love becomes their sole and terrifying connection. Will taps into Anna’s sensuousness to fill the void, systematically exploring “the many little rapturous places”(R 221), each of which drives him mad with delight and stimulates his desire to know more. “He would say during the daytime: ‘To-night I shall know the little hollow under her ankle, where the blue vein crosses’”(R 228). With that knowledge comes further anticipation of all “theundiscovered beauties and ecstatic places of delight in her body,”even “the instep of her foot, and the place from which the toes radiated out, the little, miraculous dimpling hollows between the toes”(R 231). Their sensuality ranges from innocent toes as seen and touched to the “pure darkness”of “all the shameful things of the body”(R 233-5). In like manner, Ursula, Anna and Will’s daughter, responds to Skrebensky’s kiss from the depths of her body.

It “flowed over the last fiber of her, so that they were one stream. . . and she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very bottom-most source of him”(R 447).

In referring to Lawrence’s fiction, Terry Eagleton, stressing the need to prevent the body becoming “another privileged anteriority”(Eagleton 197), claims that Lawrence constantly risks reifying the body into what is merely another

transcendental category. Yet I contend that it is not always fair to see Lawrence’s insistence on the body as simple inverted idealism, especially not when embodied

love is represented in his fiction. Possibly his re-drawing of the body in a positive light was to compensate for a weak constitution. Therefore, he argues that breasts, belly, hands, arms, elbows, wrists, thighs, knees, feet, face and buttocks are all centers of positive feeling and communication. Yet, erotic desire, as Lawrence describes it, deconstructs the Cartesian binary opposition between mind and body. Deleuze and Guattari describe Lawrence’stextuality asadesiring machine. According to them, Lawrence’stext“de-territorializes”modern sexuality:

Lawrence shows in a profound way that sexuality, including chastity, is a matter of flows, an infinity of different and even contrary flows.

Everything depends on the way in which these flows—whatever their object, source, and air—are coded and broken according to uniform figures, or on the contrary taken up in chains of decoding that resect them

according to mobile and nonfigurative points. (1983: 350)⁸

Sex in this sense is polyvalent and polymorphic. It is like a cipher in Lawrence’s fiction and is never simply sex. As a symbol, sex has empirical and non-empirical meanings. Thus in The Rainbow sex symbolizesaholy “transfiguration”ofLydia and Tom (R 91),butalso a“sensuality violentand extremeasdeath”forAnnaand Will (R 237),abond of“dark corruption”between Winifred Inger and Tom (R 322), and “adeveloping germ ofdeath”forUrsula and Skrebensky (R 429). And so it follows that sex symbolizes joy and gladness aswellas“apassion ofdeath”(R 237).

At one time, sex brings forth relaxation of consciousness, at another it is motivated by willful power over the other. Sometimes sex expresses intimacy, but at other times it expresses antagonism and self-assertion. If stories are usually considered as

promising a kind of redemption (because they offer coherence, resolution, closure), Lawrence’s erotic narrative is at best, due to its discursive heterogeneity, ambivalent about its readiness to inscribe redemption.

In place of redemption, Lawrence’s love stories pose a question about the

strange impersonality of desire. Much ofthetimeLawrence’scharactersare creatures driven by irresistible desires and compelled to act as they do— they are amoral, beyond good and evil. For instance, in his erotic relationship with Anna in the latter half of their marriage, Will is even presented as partially liberated and enabled to turn to purposive work in the world of light after his plunge into sensation which satisfies his craving for a sensual absolute. It seems that erotic experience is treated more as aesthetic experience than as moral knowledge. Barron rightly points out that Lawrence’s“aesthetic achievements are always far more subtle than his polemic”(20). In place of the moral disjunct of good/evil and right/wrong, we find in his text a cluster of aesthetic interpretive language for moral language:

rich/impoverished, spontaneous/mechanical, releasing/ repressed, creative/routine.

In other words, it is not a question of good sex or bad sex but that they illustrate the variable meanings of sex and its unharnessed power.

The intensity and extremity of Lawrence’s descriptions of erotic desire increase along with the increasing varieties of sexual experimentation. In Women in Love, Ursual puts her arms around Birkin’s loins, her face against his thigh, with her finger-tips tracing down his flanks, establishing “a rich new circuit. . . released from the darkest poles of the body . . . at the back and base of the loins”(WL 306). Ursula here traces desire to its genital-anal center with a frankness unthinkable for her

predecessors:

She had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten rock of the man’s body, from the strange marvelous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches. (WL 306)

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors even went the final step and sodomized Connie.

The act had historical significance, because it involved “burning out the shames, the