Ethics and Language—Toward an Ethics of Fiction or a Fictional Ethics?

Part One

Ethics and Language—Toward an Ethics of Fiction or a Fictional Ethics?

Out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth.

--- D. H. Lawrence Never trust the artist, trust the tale.

--- D. H. Lawrence

Every work of art adheres to some system of morality.

But if it be really a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres.

--- D. H. Lawrence

Violence appears with articulation.

---Jacque Derrida

Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question.

--- Maurice Blanchot

We have art – –lest we perish of the truth.

--- Fredrick Nietzsche

A textual practice is ethical when it is ambivalent.

--- Julia Kristeva

Chapter One Otherness in Language : Ethics and Fiction

The debate on the relationship between ethics and fiction (in broad sense, literature) yields viewpoints that cut in various, sometimes conflictual, ways. While ethics, often bracketed with morality, is popularly understood as having to do with pr obl e ms i n t he r e al l i v e s of human, f i c t i on i s “made up, ” s us t ai ne d by t he mor e or less arbitrary function of a system of signs. In the gap between the messy

complexities of empirical reality and fictionalized worlds hovers the unthematizable, Levinasian Other which both invites and resists interpretation.

I. Literature and Philosophy

For Plato, the virtues of honesty and truth to the self which are essential to the ethical are always threatened by the dishonest and dissimulatory powers of literary and poetic language. Skipping a thousand years or so, Nietzsche inverted the

Platonic hierarchy of ethical truth and the powers of language—for him, language not only represents the world, it orders, makes and remakes it. Nietzsche considers modernity as “ the will to truth”becoming conscious of itself as a problem. He challenges the features that have been valued most highly—consciousness, language, reason, and intellect. Nietzsche argues that there exists no necessary correspondence between language and the world. In one of his earliest writings, “ On Truth and Lies in a Normal Sense,”Nietzsche outlines the complete contingency and constructedness of the human world of signs:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and

anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been

poetically rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. (49)

The concept of a sign is thus fully separated from the concept of truth and involved in an ongoing process of interpretation.

In The Order of Things, Foucault gives a similar argument concerning the emergence of modernity:

The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no importance—let us say between our pre-history and what is still contemporary) has been definitely crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they discovered their ancient enigmatic clarity . . . . To the Nietzschean que s t i on: ‘ Who i s s pe a ki ng?’ Mallarme replies—and constantly reverts to that reply—by saying that what is speaking is, in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself—not the meaning of the word but its enigmatic and precarious being. (304)

If, in the original Eden, language was ordered by the world, by the process of naming,

for the modernist writer, according to Foucault, the world could only be ordered now

by language, by the process of imagining. In other words, language constitutes the

aesthetic instrument by means of which we create the world. The word, as such,

took on both a new power (no longer subordinated to the thing that it named) and a

new fragility (nothing now beyond the word to guarantee its authority). Modern

artists thus face a problem in the relationship between language, cognition, and seeing.

The shift to the category of language is mainly associated with literary theory’ s concern about the violence of language. In referring to the assimilative treatment of others in Adam’ s naming the animals, Derrida c l a i ms t ha t “ predication is the first vi ol e nc e , ” a nd t ha t “ vi ol enc e a ppe a r s wi t h ar t i c ul at i on” ( VM 147-8). That is, in the case of Adam naming the animals, by overlooking the difference between a name and the thing named, Adam may overlook what is unique about the named. Adam understands them in his own terms and his “ t a xonomi c a l ge ne r a l i t y” mus t ne gl e ct singularity of the thing he names. Blanchot also sees the linguistic “ naming”of things as being a sacrifice of reality: “ Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning”(1981: 43).

Blanchot claims that all of being must be given over to death for speech to be possible.

Language itself brings this death, and we speak only from it. Blanchot’ s words are worth following closely here:

Of course, my language does not kill anyone. And yet: when I say ‘ this

woman’ , real death is announced and already present in my language; my

language means that this person, who is there right now, can be detached

from herself, removed from her existence and her presence and plunged

suddenly into a nothingness of existence and presence. My language

essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is, at every

moment, a resolute allusion to such an event. My language does not kill

anyone. But, if this woman were not really capable of dying, if she were

not threatened by death at every moment of her life, bound and united to it

by an essential bond, I would not be able to accomplish that ideal negation,

that deferred assassination that is my language. (1981: 43)

The way Blanchot understands language and truth has much to do with his approach to literature— for him, the key question is not whether literary texts have a particular value or not, whether they are good or bad, but how they bring to the fore the question of the “ possibility of literature.” We normally understand the literary text as communicating a truth to us.

For Blanchot, on the contrary, the importance of literature is to call this truth into question. Much of Blanchot’ s complex

theory-performance is geared toward the distinction between “ literary language”and

“ common language.” This distinction is redoubled within the domain of literature:

If one looks at it in a certain way, literature has two slopes. One side of literature is turned toward the movement of negation by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to be known, subjugated, communicated.

But there is another side to literature. Literature is a concern for the reality of things, for their unknown, free and silent existence . . . . In this way, it sympathizes with darkness, with aimless passion, with lawless violence, with everything in the world that seems to perpetuate the refusal to come into the world. (Blanchot 1982: 48-9)

Put another way, on the one side, there is the realist content, which one can interpret as belonging to the social world; on the other, there is the purity of the language of literature itself, which folds back upon itself, so as to turn away from the everyday use of words. Blanchot obviously sees the chief function of literature as residing on this second slope, in the fact that its language is also an obstacle to communication.

While Plato excludes poets from his utopia because of the duplicity of their medium, Blanchot designates the power of literary language rightly in this duplicity—i.e., literary parole can function both as purveyors of truth and as harbingers of ambiguity.

Blanchot’ s motto for literature is that—“ Let us suppose that literature begins at the

moment when literature becomes a question”(Blanchot 1981: 21). Put differently, if literature is to revive its essentially ethical and political nature, it has to remember that it is essentially a power of contestation—“ contestation of the established power, contestation of what is, contestation of language and of the forms of literary language, finally contestation of itself as power”(Blanchot 1997: 67).

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva, with the similar concern about the violence of language, also explicates two functions of language, “ two modalities of what is, for us, the same signifying process. We shall call the first ‘ the semiotic’ and the second ‘ the symbolic’ ”(1984: 23-4). The symbolic function is necessary “ to express meaning in a communicable sentence between speakers”(1984: 24).

Kristeva sees a “ revolution in poetic l a nguage”starting to take place in the late 19

century. This revolution, according to Kristeva, radically unbinds the “ semiotic”

energy of language. This energy is largely tapped from the chora, the

“ nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stages in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated”(1984: 25). As Kristeva sees it, Western societies tend not to recognize the semiotic level of human existence woven of drive energy, let alone the need to harness such energy aesthetically to avoid its becoming manifest in violence. For Kristeva, literature, especially in its open and experimental forms, seems to be a privileged medium for training negotiations across boundaries that demarcate semiotic otherness. This is perhaps literature’ s most crucial advantage over the occidental philosophical tradition which Levinas sees as haunted by the fear of otherness as well as the fear that the other remains other.

While thus reflecting the irreducible heteronomy of the Other, literature

conceived as such involves a dangerous denial of any link between texts and reality,

which is also one of the decisive questions raised by the above thinkers. It is in

terms of Nietzsche that one can best highlight both the possibilities and the risks of a

critical strategy that assumes the perspective of art to counter the limitations of systematic thought. For Nietzsche, art (including literature) is the countermovement to religion, morality, and philosophy, and has a privileged affirmative and disruptive force. Yet Nietzsche’ s f a mous phr a s e —“ We ha ve a r t – l e s t we pe r i s h of t he t r ut h”

(1968: 435)—risks the danger of making art another version of the (philosophical ) truth.

Indeed, art and literature lose their critical force if their place is taken for granted, if they are posited as alternatives to the truth. Therefore, if art is to function critically, it must also move beyond art and function outside of all forms of

aestheticism. Put another way, if literature is an act of transgression, it is only to the extent that transgression is understood not as a breach of the law in the anarchic name of lawlessness, which results only in a reinforcement of the law, but rather as an act of contestation of the repressive authority. In that sense, if literature proves to be transgression of philosophical discourse, it is not because it confronts the law of

representation from a position of greater authority, but because it, in Blanchot’ s words,

“ carries the law away with it”(1992: 139).

Addressing the issue of the relationship between fiction and truth, text and reality, Derrida seeks to deconstruct the binary oppositions of Western thinking that underlies much of his critique of the various types of traditional literary criticism:

Criticism of content alone (thematic criticism, be it philosophical,

sociological or psychoanalytic, which takes the theme—manifest or latent,

full or empty—for the substance of the text, for its object or for the truth it

is illustrating) can no more cope with certain texts . . . than can a purely

formalist criticism, which is only interested in the code, in the pure play of

the signifier, in the technical construction of a text-object, and which

neglects the genetic effects or the (‘ historical’ , if you like) inscription of

the text being read and of the new text that the criticism itself is writing.

These two inadequacies are rigorously complementary. (1981b: 63-4) In other words, traditional literary criticism, in their various ways, sets up a false opposition between form and content, and concentrates on the one at the expense of the other. In Derrida’ s opinion, a literary text is not a closed totality as the formalists would have it, nor a reflection of a more real external world. The real world is both the source of art and bears an “ other”relation to art.

Therefore, while following Nietzsche with his revaluation of truth, Derrida

nevertheless insists that his own deconstructive enquiry is not simply to reduce

philosophy to literature or to assimilate thought to metaphor, but to propose a new

way of understanding the relationship between concept and metaphor, truth and

fiction. For Derrida, literature is not merely the other of communicative action, or,

as Habermas would wan t t o s e e i t , a s i mpl y “ non-s e r i ous us e of l a nguage ”(1987: 205)

in which validity claims are entirely suspended.

Literature is for Derrida no less

serious an attempt to consider the nature of right actions than any ethical or political

discourse. Surely the possibility that reference is indirect seems to mean that we

have no reliable access to experience or to history and no basis for political action or

ethical decision. Deconstruction has thus often been identified with the claim that

reference is a fiction. Derrida has many times tried to correct the misreading of his

work: “I ne ve r ce a s e t o be s ur pr i s e d by cr i t i c s who s e e my wor k a s a dec l ar a t i on t ha t

there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact,

saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search

f or t he ‘ ot he r ’ a nd t he ‘ ot he r of l a nguage ’ ”(1984: 123). For Derrida, to treat the

literary text as a self-referential game is to reinforce the philosophy/literature, or

serious/nonserious, opposition by which philosophy constitutes itself. The effect of

a deconstructive reading of literature is not to eliminate the referential power of texts,

but rather to produce a relationship in which the hierarchy of truth and rhetoric is not

inverted but subject to a ceaseless contortion of exchange.

Generally, in the current debate over literature and ethics, literature is seen either as raw material for ethical analysis and is valued for what it contributes to moral insight, or literature is seen as utterly autonomous from ethics and thus impervious to direct ethical evaluation. On the one hand, those who use and judge literature for its edifying value risk ignoring its distinctive value and autonomy as literature. If the philosopher turns to literature to harvest philosophical insights or truths, then literature serves, at best, only as the handmaiden of philosophy in its quest for aperspectival truth. On the other hand, those who defend obsessively the

autonomy of literature may overlook the values and ends implicit in its creation and in the reality it depicts. Moreover, to abandon the philosophical search for truth and general understanding on the grounds that there is no truth as traditionally conceived, but only perspectives, is problematic. If the philosophical text becomes a literary text, a text that offers a particular philosopher’ s perspective on the world, philosophy could be laid to rest. While the places of literature and philosophy should not be fixed up and taken for granted, the tension between them is clear and not resolvable.

They act continually as a reminder to each other of the need to question themselves.

We may discern such a dialectic relation between literature and philosophy in Lawrence’ s texts. Lawrence was certainly a novelist with a purpose. He insisted over and over again that the purpose of his writing was, in the last analysis, didactic.

Philosophy had come to interest him, and inevitably affected his presentation of life.

Some critics may doubt the possibility for the artist and prophet to coexist in the same work, yet Lawrence himself leaves no doubt that his own goal is to bring forth the interaction of fiction and philosophy in the novel:

Plato’ s Dialogues . . . are queer little novels . . . . It was the greatest pity

in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. They used to be one,

right from the days of myth. Then they went and parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant.

So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again, in the novel. (STH 154-5)

Hence in his fiction, ideas are often expressed poetically and metaphorical language is used to express ideas. In Lawrence, if we separate the prophecy and the artistry then we have not really responded to either of them. Many of his writings explore the complicated way the novel allows theory and tests it on the pulse of poetic language.

As it is, Lawrence’ s fiction is made of words but is not just an ordinary use of them; that is, it is made of language but not merely of what we use language to produce — meanings, concepts, propositions, and so on. It is as much a response to language as a use of it. Lawrence’ s use of language reminds us of Levinas’ s explication of the formal structure of language. Levinas argues that language is not only “ a system of signs in the service of a pre-existing thought”(1990: 9), it also involves a dimension of invocation and address. Put differently, though

comprehension of the Other is part of our aim, every comprehension of the Other is simultaneously address to the Other. This divergence between the Other as my theme and the Other as interlocutor is posited as the “ formal structure”of language (TI 195). Situating himself in the formal structure of language, Lawrence speaks to as well as speaks with that language. In that sense, he is more than a moral novelist who seeks to preach a stable set of moral rules through his writing. Th e “thick”

moral thinking in Lawrence’ s literary text is a process of questioning, pondering, and

doubting, which does not issue in prescriptive assertions but remains unexhausted and

subject to reassessment.

II. Lawrence as a Moral Novelist

As has been mentioned above, while once the Leavisite critics defended Lawrence as a moral and wholly reconstructive novelist, critics now seemed able to move away from such a restrictive view and to explore new arguments about the certainty of Lawrence’ s moral vision. In fact, in many of his expository writings, Lawrence himself points to the great moral value of the novel in destabilizing the fixed sorts of insights that tend to be inscribed in discursive modes such as philosophy, religion, and science.

Though he values art because it is essentially moral in its function, its morality is nevertheless dependent on its being art in the first place.

Without abolishing one in favor of the other, Lawrence illustrates both the necessity of a philosophical outlook for the novelist and the dangers of art becoming only a

handmaiden to philosophy instead of a kind of antagonist or critic against it. As he puts it:

Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background of the structural skeleton of some theory of being: some metaphysic. But the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic

purpose beyond the artist’ s conscious aim. Otherwise the novel becomes a treatise. (STH 91)

Put another way, art as language must inevitably be intertextual, interacting infinitely with other languages, but its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it cannot be exhausted by these other discourses. Any novel must have some metaphysic, but this theory can never become abstract or absolute because the novel will immediately defy the theory imposed upon it:

If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the

novel gets up and walks away with the nail. Morality in the novel is the

trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is

immorality. (STH 172)

In a word, the future of the novel is inextricably bound up with the fact that it is “ so incapable of the absolute”(STH 179). Whatever static binary oppositions the author may start out with, one test of the true classic is the degree to which the work either clings to them or entertains doubts, uncertainties, dialogic criticisms, which allow these oppositions to become unstable and fluid by interacting with one another.

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence is keenly sensitive to aesthetic values. Nietzsche condemns modern philosophers for substituting ethical questions for aesthetic questions. The aesthetic, for Nietzsche, is defined by its transgression of the

boundaries between good and evil. Likewise, whether in his fiction or philosophical works, Lawrence continues to re-examine the central idea of the location of moral viewpoints within the framework of aesthetic experience and response. He establishes a place for truth in art: “ Out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth”

(SCAL 8). Yet the truth in art is not imposed by the artist but a natural part of the work:

An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth.

Truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today . . . . Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

(SCAL 8)

Even so, Lawrence’ s fiction shows him to be against the Aesthetic and the Decadent

movement in art. Lawrence’ s position concerning the connection between life and

art is akin to what Levinas suggests in his essay “ Reality and Its Shadow.” In

Levinas’ s words, “ discussion over the primacy of art or of nature—does art imitate nature or does natural beauty imitate art?—fails to recognize the simultaneity of truth and image” (1989: 136). Lawrence’ s novels dramatize this simultaneity, and from it arises important ethical questions. It is not that reality comes first and casts a shadow that is art; they are two contemporary possibilities of being.

Consequently, Lawrence seems to respond not so much to the “ thing”as to the movement of life in the thing. Paul’ s remarks on his painting in Sons and Lovers, concerning the question of representation, is often quoted as indicating an important quality of Lawrence’ s writing: “ Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really”(SL 152). I n “ The Spi r i t of Pl a c e s , ” Lawrence outlines his conception of literary language: “ Art-speech is also a language of pure symbols. But whereas the authorized symbol stands always for a thought or an ideal . . . the art-symbol or art-term stands for a pure experience, emotional and passional, spiritual and perceptual, all at o ne ”(SM 18-9). Lawrence’ s conception of art-symbols constitutes an effort to imagine a kind of literary discourse that is

inexhaustible and dynamic, invulnerable either to petrifaction or decay. The

meaning of art-symbol is beyond the limitation of any systematic thought and thus can never be explained away. On that ground, the textuality is seen in effect as an

endless process of deconstruction and reconstruction, a concrete embodiment of the process of difference. There is always something still lurking behind the expression.

The “ Moony”chapter in Women in Love proposes rightly a text that is troped as texture. The words used in the scene are figured as webbings and weavings,

composing poetry of the transitive and the transitional. Through a rhetorical ploy, this scene highlights the manner in which differential effects are contained and overcome. The moon was first presented as an image of reflexive self-presence,

“ perfect in its stillness”(WL 277). Then Birkin’ s stone-throwing acts out the rupture

inscribed as a Derridean “ slipping between,”the displacement of the truth/falsehood dichotomy within which Birkin feels trapped: “ There wouldn’ t have to be any truth, if there weren’ t lies. Then one needn’ t assert anything” (WL 277-8). Yet the

explosive fragmentation which creates multiple centers and brings a total destruction is precisely staged in terms of the reconstitution of a center, as “ the fragments caught together reunited,”and the “ heart”of the moon is restored (WL 278-9). In other words, however disruptive the differential “ between”might be, the return to the

“ norm”is ensured by a reflexive movement. For all that, this scene, through a kind of performative rhetoric, emblematizes the differential effect attuned to reverberations of difference which the logocentric structures can neither completely comprehend nor control.

It is in this sense that Lawrence anticipates Kristeva’ s view that art is less an object and more a process, or a practice. According to Kristeva, “ poetic language fulfils the ethical function of art by being a signifying practice”(1984: 195-7).

Poetic language pluralizes and musicalizes all static socio-symbolic features. The disruptive semiotic function “ shows the constraints of a civilization dominated by transcendental rationality”(1980: 140), and thus destroys the “ naturalness”of its limitations, showing them to be “ subject”to flexibility and change. The ethical function of art, therefore, is not the same as its ideological, or communicative, function. As Kristeva sees it, the artist who dissolves identities and shatters the communicative and representative aspect of language often finds it difficult to gain recognition, that is, to be accepted as different. That is, to a society not open to difference, to the other, and to “ love” , this type of artist who wanders “ at the borders of the speakable and the visible”is usually regarded as a “ threat”(Kristeva 1987: 339).

Therefore, Kristeva suggests that new symbolic means are needed to recognize and

cultivate this difference, for this is not a difference which in the end is simply another

version of the same, but a semiotic difference which transcends Hegelian negation.

That the ethical function of art lies in its signifying practice implies that ethics conceived as such is not so much a stable set of principles, values, or prescriptions, as a matrix from which various discourses, disciplines, or practices fan out and in which they meet.

In “ Morality and the Novel, ”Lawrence writes justly about the texture of a morality based on relatedness: “ And morality is that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness”(STH 72). By extension, Lawrence believes that good art reveals “ the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment”(STH 173). In Women in Love, Birkin’ s broadly tolerant remarks on the African statuette i n Ha l l i day’ s f l a tepitomize Lawrence’ s belief. Dismissing the statuette as “ rather obscene,”Gerald asks Birkin: “ Why is it art?” Birkin replies: “ It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it”(WL 133). To Gerald’ s accusation that such a statue cannot be considered “ high art,”Birkin replies:

“ High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort”(WL 133). To Birkin, good art is moral art, though not moralistic art or even art expressive of values he approved. In Bell’ s words, the African statuette reveals for Birkin “ the limitation of his own habitual culture, even if it cannot of itself provide a positive alternative”

(1991: 129). Throughout the novel, both primitive art and Modern art are presented as great art, though the author or the hero may personally dislike most of it and prefer other values and other forms. Art that expresses questionable values can still be good if those values are truly those of the artist, his society, or both.

And this is why any simplified moral polarization is inadequate for reading

Lawrence’ s fiction. Viewpoints of moral values are, as has been indicated above,

usually re-examined within the framework of aesthetic experience. Take another

example from the scene in which Gerald maltreats his Arab mare at the level crossing.

Examining the language Lawrence e mpl oys t o de s c r i be Gudr un’ s physical sensations at the sight of Gerald’ s cruel and bloody act shows that it is difficult to arrive at a consistent moral evaluation when opposite points-of-view are dramatized with almost equal clarity and vividness. Gerald’ s behavior is severely repudiated by Ursula as brutal and domineering. However, in some kinds of writing, such experiences of intense physical sensation, in which the mind is temporarily suspended in torrent of extreme emotion, are presented as desirable rather than condemned: “It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which seemed to penetrate her heart . . . . The world reeled and passed into nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more”(WL 169-70). Lawrence ’ s presentation of Gudrun’ s experience calls to our mind the way Birkin describes the African statuette mentioned above. When Birkin is defining for Gerald the quality of the African statuette, he seems to be describing as desirable a state very much like that of Gu dr un’ sat the level-crossing: “ t he e xt r e me of phys i c a l s e ns a t i on, beyond t he l i mi t s of me nt a l c ons c i ous nes s ”(WL 127), “ so sensual as to be final, supreme”(WL 133). Just like the statue is valued aesthetically beyond good and evil, so it seems that the significance of the scene at the level-crossing as an isolated moment, an aesthetic phenomenon, has little to do with moral judgment:

“ And through the man in the closed wagon, Gudrun could see the whole scene spectacularly, isolated and momentary, like a vision isolated in eternity”(WL 170).

In such a way, Lawrence in his fiction brings into existence what he notices or

feels, which is not always what makes a “ good story”or satisfying moral but what

attracts him. The social or ideological justification for the attraction may or may not

be clear, but for Lawrence, to ignore it is to let the work of art die. Nonetheless, as I

have claimed earlier, Lawrence is by no means an aesthete, a position represented by

Loerke, a professional artist in Women in Love. In defense of a drawing of his green

bronze of a girl on a stallion, which Ursula regards as the expression of male

domination, Loerke grandly and extravagantly insists on the radical separation of art and life:

It is a work of art; it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making of confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action with the absolute world of art. That you must not do. (WL 525)

Taking the aesthetic as his most serious category, Loerke uses the notion of form to remove art from reality, ignoring one of Lawrence’ s main points about Modern art—

i.e., an art which detaches form from reality reveals a serious disorder in the artist’ s relationship to the cosmos.

On the other hand, Ursula’ s insistence on simple realism is too much a reaction and too naïve. She first accuses Loerke of having abused the girl-model for the statue and then, “ white and trembling,”maintains that “ the world of art is only the truth about the real world, that’ s all—but you are too far gone to see it”(WL 526).

Ursula ignores an obvious prerogative of the artist: the right to use objects and

creatures symbolically, a right often exercised through the distortion of photographic

realism. In contrast to Loerke, she too narrowly and moralistically defines the

boundaries of art and life. Lawrence appears to be on both sides and simultaneously

on neither side. Never so naïve as to believe that an artist could proceed without

form or design, Lawrence nonetheless believes that when design becomes a final end

in itself, inflexible and absolute, it undermines the ultimate purpose of art and casts a

shadow over life. His discussion of the principles of “ Law and Love”may express his belief in reference to this—i.e., art, like morality, must continually seek a

trembling balance between stability and motion, order and change: “ Artistic form is a revelation of the two principles of Love and the Law in a state of conflict and yet reconciled”(STH 90).

III. Ethics of Reading Lawrence’ s Fiction

Generally, there are two tendencies related to the discussion over how otherness is related to the study of ethics and literature. The first is perhaps most associated with philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre or Martha Nussbaum, who have turned to literary examples in their considerations of ethics. This mode of reading is based on what Blanchot calls “ the informational model of l a nguage”(1982: 41). In this mode, which we might call “ reading for ethics”(Morrissey 329-30), literature serves an almost demonstrative role, showing readers how to lead a better life and how to treat others ethically. For literature to work as part of moral inquiry as the moral philosophers see it, they have unproblematically to assume that a text is not a

linguistic artifact but a surface beneath which there are real situations and real events.

This approach means that although the events of a novel can be interpreted, the representation of the events cannot. The medium, the words which make up the novel, becomes invisible. However, as we have learned from the thinkers mentioned above, without words literature is nothing; what is more, in literature it is not only the meaning of words that matters, but their texture. Paul de Man has made this point clear by arguing that t he a c t of r e a di ng i t s e l f i mpl i e s t ha t “ l i t e r a t ur e i s not a

transparent message in which it can be taken for granted that the distinction between

the message and the means of communicati on i s c l e a r l y e s t a bl i s he d” ( 1986: 15).

While the first model posits similarity between narrative and real situations of ethical decision, the other model, which we might call “ ethics of reading”(Morrissey 330), usually focuses on the irreducible difference between the text and the ethical situation it is purported to represent. In other words, this model pays primary attention to the text as a linguistic artifact. To employ the “ window”analogy, the motto that “ the glass must be read as a text”(Derrida 1981a: 233) has become an ethical imperative in this model.

Thus De Man discusses ethics as “ a form of rhetoric”(1979: 206), arguing that ethics occurs only in language and not in some transcendental realm. J. Hillis Miller also claims that there is a necessary moment in that act of reading as such, that it is reading itself which raises the ethical questions as much as the narratives read (1987: 1). Miller’ s claim is that, in reading, we respond to a linguistic necessity— the necessity to read and thus to misread. For both Miller and de Man, the ethical law in narrative is both limited to language and springs from language. This approach prioritizes whatever in the text resists assimilation to the same. On that ground, some features, such as interpretive ambivalence, verbal ambiguity, linguistic complexity, poetic compression, and ironic reversal are emphasized in this understanding of reading ethically.

Miller’ s New Criticism version of the ethics of deconstruction is desirable in its

intent. But as Simon Critchley points out, Miller’ s ethics seems to be limited to the

reading of books in the context of a North American university (1992: 47). Geoffrey

Ga l t Ha r pha m a l s o a r gues t ha t Mi l l e r ’ s unde r s t anding of ethics is too thin and too

weak.

By focusing on the act of reading, Miller has taken the literary text away

from a discussion of its ethical concerns. An ethical reading, as we have seen for

Mi l l e r , “ c a nnot . . . be a cc ount e d f or by . . . s ocia l a nd hi s t or i c a l f or c e s ” and the result

of each reading can bring us nowhere than to the conclusion that “ it hides its matter as

much as it reveals it’ (Miller 1987: 8, 121). But the worl d ha s “ thickness,”an

extra-linguistic basis, with which we must engage. Tobin Siebers therefore claims that Mi l l e r ’ s a ppr oac h r epr e s e nt s “ an isolated linguistic morality which robs ethical t he or y of i t s s oc i a l c ont ent ” ( 39) . It seems that what Miller proclaims is not the i mpor t a nc e of “ the ethics of reading”but rather t he s i gni f i ca nce of “ t he r e adi ngof ethics.” This understanding of the power of textuality over referentiality prevents Miller from unproblematically introducing a satisfying theory of ethics.

While Nussbaum does not find textuality of the text problematic, Miller follows textual anomalies too tightly as to come to disparate conclusions all the time. In other words, while Nussbaum reads literature as moral philosophy, Miller reads moral philosophy as literature. As has been quoted above, Blanchot, employing the

Levinasian ethics, proposes three ways of reading in discussing how ethics appears in a literary text. The third way of reading provided by Blanchot—“ that ‘ inspiring’

insomnia when, all having been said, ‘ Saying’ is heard”(1986b: 101)—may serve as supplement to the above two modes of reading. As Blanchot sees it, the problem of reading is not only a struggle with meaning, but the encounter with an imperative to listen, the demand for an act of listening that is nonetheless not simply an act of comprehending.

It is this demand that Levinas describes as the encounter with the other which interrupts the play of the Same and thereby opens a dimension of

response to what can not be appropriated. A Levinasian ethics, according to Gibson, would then be to treat a text “ as mobile and subtle complex relations, as always caught up in a play of composition and fission, of repetition and difference”(91).

The ethical mode of the text is not one in which particularities are mere illustrations of a stable, pre-existing system, but one in which “ eternal unfinishedness”(Bakhtin 1981:

93) is of cardinal importance. Yet horizons insistently return, or recompose

themselves, as we have seen suggested by the “ Moony”chapter in Women in Love

mentioned above. In reference to this, Adam Newton, in his study of narrative ethics,

describes the responsibility of a story’ s reader or listener as twofold:

In part it means learning the paradoxical lesson that ‘ getting’ someone else’ s story is also a way of losing the person as ‘ real’ as ‘ wha the is’ ; it is a way of appropriating or allegorizing that endangers both intimacy and ethical duty. At the same time, however, one’ s responsibility consists of responding to just this paradox. (19)

As an other, the text can never and should never be conquered nor exhausted by the reader. And yet, on the other hand, there is no meaning that does not culminate in a transformation of the Other into the Same; that is, no reading can be completed except in the form of understanding or knowledge. In Levinasian terms, the ethical Saying as an interruption can come to appear only as the (justified) Said as an interpretation.

Put more precisely, much as the reader’ s responsibility to understand the dangers of appropriating and allegorizing and to avoid careless treatment even of fictional people, it is also his/her responsibility to run these risks and embrace these paradoxes for the sake of ethical meaning-making.

As we have seen in the above, and will see more in the following, the reading of Lawrence’ s fiction demands just the similar process of interpretation and interruption.

While some moral message or insight can always be discerned through his fiction, moment of alterity from time to time opens up within the text which allows it to deliver itself up to an “ other”reading. His art-speech is continually reaching through words toward a vital meaning or experience that cannot be fixed.

Conventional words and phrases are destabilized, subjected to ironic reconsideration.

Accordingly, in the language- and discourse-oriented paradigm shift, we should read more attentively, closely, and sensitively to learn how to complicate our first reading, especially the reading of texts that are continually engaged in an act of “ commentary.”

In effect, Lawrence himself advocates a similar notion of ethics of reading. In

Apocalypse, Lawrence reiterates his belief in art and articulates his own aesthetic position with reference to it:

Once a book is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it . . . . The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning. (A 4-5)

On account of this, to read Lawrence from a fixed agenda-driven perspective is to fall into the danger of operating from exactly the same mental consciousness that he abhorred and fought against all his life. To read is to be vulnerable. A responsible reader is the one who follows the imperative: “ Be unpr e pa r e d” ( Docherty 1990: 32)!

In short, the reader should not contemplate literature as example but to acknowledge it as “ a f or ay, a many-s i de d e xpe r i e nt i a l ‘ hypot he s i s ’ , a n ‘ a dve nt ur e ,’ and a ‘ s uppos e ’ ” (Adamson 103).

Given the linguistic complexity in Lawrence’ s fiction, I contend that an ethics of reading his texts calls for deliberate attention to the characteristic style of his work—i.e., that of self-criticism and slightly-modified repetition. As I have pointed out in the above, there are certain presuppositions so crucial to the conduct of

orthodox Lawrentian studies that critics have neglected the self-interrogative forces in

his writing. In fact, the essential self-criticism pervades explicitly or implicitly both

Lawrence’ s fiction and non-fiction writing. In “ Study of Thomas Hardy,”Lawrence

specifically envisions art, and particularly the art of the novel, as a special kind of

reflection that can in fact criticize its own systems and theories: “ Every work of art

adheres to some system of morality. But if it be really a work of art, it must contain

the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres”(STH 89. Emphasis

Added.). What he called “ art-speech”remains open to experience by virtue of its unique capacity for self-critique and self-correction. Its most distinctive quality, as Michael Ragussis suggests in his reading of Lawrence’ s fiction, is to be “ capable of a subtle overhearing of itself”(5), even when it is most minutely occupied with its own systems and procedures. Mos t uns ympa t he t i c r ea di ngs of La wr e nce ’ s work tend to slight the complexity of both the evolving drama and the ideas themselves. Once they are taken into account it is difficult to maintain that Lawrence is using his novel as a pulpit, that he is forcing Lawrentian dogma on the reader. This often requires from the reader not only constant attention to underlying emotional currents but a determined analysis of what is said. Some unexpected meanings emerge only after the arguments are carefully weighed, not only against the known biases of the

speakers, but against each other. Much of the power and originality of Lawrence’ s novels lies in the ways it invites readers into “ the thick of the scrimmage”among the multiplicity of voices, attitudes, feelings, thoughts, disagreements, and quarrels which it dramatizes. Opposing voices have thus become one of the most central metaphors.

As Wayne Booth notes, “ it is a mistake to talk of Lawrence’ s deliberately blurred handling of point of view as simply a technical innovation: it is a powerful ethical invention”(450). Booth recognizes that Lawrence was experimenting radically with what it means for a novelist to lose his own distinct voice in the voices of his

characters, especially in their inner voices:

Again and again Lawrence surrenders the telling of the story to another

mind, a mind neither clearly approved nor clearly repudiated yet presented

in a tone that seems to demand judgment. I don’ t know of any novelist,

not even Dostoevsky, who takes free indirect style further in the direction

of sustained surrender to a passionate mimesis giving us not two clear

voices, the (silent) author’ s and the independent character’ s, but a chorus

of voices, each speaking with its own authority. (446-7)

Through a language of de-authorization, Lawrence develops, revises, or even discards ideas in his fiction.

The search is thus not for a fixed set of beliefs or principles in Lawrence’ s work, but for a series of “ testing”whereby the philosophies and concepts are thrown open to exploration. Art must in some sense deconstruct itself: “ The degr e e t o whi c h t he s ys t e m of mor a l i t y . . . of a ny wor k of a r t i s submitted to criticism within the work of art makes the lasting value and satisfaction of that wor k” ( STH 89). As such, Lawrence constantly uses terms in contradictory clusters so that their normal meaning is challenged, modified or even reversed. Or else he uses the word singly but with an odd inflection that leads us to construct its

significance anew in context. Words interrogate themselves most obviously in a novel like Women in Love. Bi r ki n’ s wor ds a r e no mor e s a c r e d t ha n a ny ot he r ’ s , a nd the word he uses positively is found in debased form in the mouths of other characters.

For example, some key terms like “ inhuman,”“ pure,”“ perfect,”and “ mystic”are used to present both Gerald’ s worship of the machine and a moment of transcendent sexual experience shared by Birkin and Ursula. One cannot help but feel perplexed that while Gerald founds hi s i ndus t r y on a n “ i nhuma n pr i nc i pl e ” ( WL 228),Birkin wants a relationship with Ursula that is also b a s e d on s ome t hi ng “ i nhuma n” ( WL 46).

And we see that Birkin’ s insistence on a state in which the individual is “ responsible for nothing”(WL 138) begins to give a hint of ironic childishness when seen in Winifred, who, “ like a soulless bird flirts on its own will, without attachment or responsibility, beyond the moment”(WL 212). It seems that Lawrence does not expect so much to find a pattern in words that will mirror a pattern in the world as to use language to strike at language. That is why we should pay careful attention to his language— not only to his way wi t h wor ds but t o wor d’ s way wi t h hi m. Here J.

Hillis Miller’ s remark highlights the language use in Lawrence’ s fiction: “ Though a

given word . . . may seem to choose univocally one of these possibilities of meaning, the other meanings are always there as a shimmering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in the sentence”(1979: 219).

Certainly the self-interrogating force inherent in and between words cannot be detected independent from textual repetition. It should be noted that repetition is not an incidental awkwardness but an essential feature of language use in Lawrence’ s fiction. In fact, people who do not like Lawrence’ s pr os e of t e n s ay t ha t hi s gr e a t fault is repetitiousness, which often results in confusion and contradiction.

Lawrence himself comments on the charge in the Foreword to Women in Love:

In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author: and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination. (WL 486)

Lawrence thus holds that the prose is less a technique of statement than a mode of presenting feelings. With a style of “ slightly modified repetition,”Lawrence’ s writing strains beyond the parameters of objective reality, seeking to describe some elusive, probably non-existent supra-reality. Lawrence at his strongest is an astonishing writer adept at saying what cannot be said, showing what cannot be shown. By pushing language to its repetitive extremes, Lawrence attempts to present something he believes to be there, but which proves to be unreal on the evidence of language.

The following passage from The Rainbow manifests well the style of “ pulsing, frictional to-and-fro”rhythm:

They worked together, coming and going, in a rhythm, which carried

their feet and their bodies in tune. She stooped, she lifted the burden of

sheaves, she turned her face to the dimness where he was, and went with her burden over the stubble. She hesitated, set down her sheaves, there was a swish and hiss of mingling oats, he was drawing near, and she must turn again . . . .

He worked steadily, engrossed, threading backwards and forwards like a shuttle across the strip of cleared stubble, weaving the lone line of ridding shocks, nearer and nearer to the shadowy trees, threading his sheaves with hers.

And always, she was gone before he came. As he came, she drew away, as he drew away, she came. Were they never to meet? (R 112) Recognizing the necessary indirection of “ meaning”in the emotional domain,

Lawrence relies on rhythmic effect, verbal repetition, and the elaboration of language to achieve various poetic effects, which enable him to communicate l a ngua ge’ s emotional meanings. At the rhythmic level created by the syntax and word-order, it is the violent emotional currents which are more strongly suggested. In such a way the repetitions express the developing impulses as they arise in the lives of these characters at these moments. Lawrence’ s way of respecting what cannot be said is also his way of getting it said.

With a careful act of listening, we might find the insistent repetition with variation which is the hallmark of Lawrence’ s style. And it follows that the novels are collectively read more like a palimpsest than a series of discrete statements.

Here Lawrence anticipates the way Gilles Deleuze places difference in the context of

repetition. Working against the philosophy of representation, Deleuze seeks to

demonstrate the productive aspect of difference.

On that account, repetition is not

defined as the return of the same, nor as the reiteration of the identical; repetition is,

quite the contrary, the production of difference. In like manner, within and through

repetition, moment of alterity opens up within the Lawrentian text, which is engaged in a rehearsal of its internal exigencies through an act of “ commentary.” In other words, Lawrence repeatedly asserts his most important ideas and yet the repetitions are never quite identical—the gradual changes constitute gradual redefinition. It is in this sense that both Deleuze and Guatari praise Lawrence as one of those writers

“ who leave us troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie their writing to real and unheard-of becoming”(1988: 244).

The modified repetition in Lawrence is inseparable from an endless semantic modification; we are never allowed to feel assured t ha t a f i na l “ s i gni f i e d”has been reached. Lawrence insists that “ art-symbols”must not be allowed to diminish into

“ labels”and we “ can never explain them away”(A 142, 48). Artists whose material is the written language are limited to a comparatively fixed body of signifiers.

Lawrence’ s strategy is to use the same signifiers to express constantly shifting signifieds, so that the meaning is always unstable and on the move. Therefore, we might say Lawrence’ s narrative contributes to ethics not because it establishes a fixed moral order but because it implies the “ interactive”and “ relational”nature of that order. In the words of Adam Newton, who defines narrative ethics not in terms of normative statements but in terms of relation, Lawrence’ s narrative might be regarded

“ as relationship and human connectivity, as Saying over and above Said, or as Said

called to account in Saying; narrative as claim, as risk, as responsibility, as gift, as

price”(7). By examining the linguistic complexities and textual differences in

Lawrence’ s fiction, I aim, in what follows, to provide a discussion about Lawrence’ s

treatment of the ethics of vision and the relation between language and the ethical self.

Chapter Two Ethics of Vision: Blindness and Insight

Lawrence’ s exploration of the paradoxical relations between the eye and the field of vision, the mind and the field of knowledge, anticipates Continental thinkers’

suspicion of the visual implication in modern thought. Through a style of

self-interrogation and the slightly-modified repetition, Lawrence’ s deliberation of the problem of seeing and knowing is in many ways something that we are articulating in our concerns with the ethics of alterity.

I. The Denigration of Ocularcentrism

Since Plato’ s allegory of the cave, light and the role of sight have been accorded a unique position in the Western tradition. They have stood as a metaphor for truth and objectivity and the very axis of modern rationalism. More recently, however, this status has come under significant criticism from Continental thought. Martin Jay describes convincingly a “ denigration of vision”in the twentieth-century French thought:

The modern era . . . has been dominated by the sense of sight in a way that

sets it apart from its pre-modern predecessors and possibly its postmodern

successor. Beginning with the Renaissance and the scientific revolution,

modernity has been normally considered resolutely ocularcentric . . . .

Whether we focus on ‘ t hemirror of nature’metaphor in philosophy with

Richard Rorty or emphasize the prevalence of surveillance with Michel

Foucault or bemoan the society of the spectacle with Guy Debord, we

confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the

modern era. (1993b: 114)

According to Jay, “ Cartesian perspectivism”is often assumed to be “ equivalent to the modern scopic regime per se”(1993b: 115). Descartes’ radical division of mind and body leads to a logic of expression, according to which the intelligible activities of a knowing subject is entirely separated from the passive mechanisms of a physical body.

In objectivity, the world is severed from the observer; in knowability, communion is re-established through the mediation of light. Jay summaries major features of ocularcentrism as follows— linear perspective was taken to be a faithful

representation for everything that could be visually represented; in addition to linear elements, it emphasized measurability, predictability, detachment and control; it implied a fixed, monocular viewing position, reducing the importance of narrative or discursive content in favour of formal and logical structure (1993b: 118).

Indeed, many of the twentieth-century French intellectuals were extraordinarily suspicious of the visual implication in modern thought while no less sensitive to the importance of vision itself.

With a shared distrust toward ocularcentirsm, both Levinas and Blanchot abandon the traditional philosophical preoccupation with ontology based on “ the eternally present order of vision”(Levinas 1989:157).

Blanchot is urgent to explore the antinomic relations between night and day, blindness and insight, obfuscation and enlightenment. Denouncing the alleged French passion for clarity, Blanchot suggests, in works like La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), that noontime, the hour of greatest visibility, was also the hour of greatest danger, the time when looking at the sun brought blindness. Nor was the night any more conducive to lucid vision. What he proposes is the “ ot he rnight,”the murmur of un-negatable being, which withdraws from the dialectical opposition of day and night.

Blanchot subverted the contemplative appreciation of the starry heavens that has been

a fundamental premise of Western metaphysics, demanding instead “ the writing of the

disaster”—thus literally “ dis-aster” — which means relinquishing any fixed star in the visible firmament as the ground of meaning (1986b: 5)

.

Blanchot’ s concern with “ the duplicity of vision”parallels Levinas’ s claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology. Levinas is an idiosyncratic

philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, not only because of his reversal of the traditional subordination of the ethical to the ontological, but also because, in a tradition which privileges the specular, his theory of ethical subjectivity is theorized within the metaphor of touch. For Levinas, vision is emblematic of habitual economy and its tendency to grasp and possess. Vision is a violence and a form of adequation. Denouncing the fundamental narcissism of vision, Levinas regards the phenomenologically given world as a self-defined totality, which Derrida describes as such— “ everything given to me within light appears as given to myself by myself”

(VM 92). In other words, any emanation of light belies the desire to take hold of something or appropriate something for oneself. For Levinas, light is the medium which sustains and bridges the difference between a subject of perception and perceivable things: “ Light makes objects into a world, that is, makes them belong to us”(EE 48). That is, in a world of light, everything other than the self belongs, through intentionality, to the self. The egoism of intentionality is based on the establishment of a sense of being at the center of a panoramic objective world:

Light makes possible . . . this enveloping of the exterior by the inward,

which is the very structure of the cogito and of sense. Thought is always

clarity or the dawning of a light. The miracle of light is the essence of

thought: due to the light an object, while coming from without, is already

ours in the horizon which precedes it; it comes from an exterior already

apprehended and comes into being as though it came from us, as though

commanded by our freedom. (EE 48)

Therefore, the lucidity of things and ideas is primarily the result of egoism which seeks to find oneself in the light. Levinas thus indicates (not without tones of melancholy) the limited freedom of the ego as a self-defined totality: “ The ‘ I’ always has one foot caught in its own existence”(EE 84).

Levinas’ s disclosure of the appropriating and subsuming nature of light and ego calls to our mind Lawrence’ s exposition of the crisis brought out by the modern form of consciousness, which might be recapitulated in Heidegger’ s word: “ The impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his

construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion. It seems as though ma n e ve r ywhe r e a nd a l ways e nc ount er s onl y hi ms e l f ”(1977: 27). The mind/body split, which leads to what Lawrence called “ the masturbating consciousness,”is often connected by Lawrence to the Cartesian self-consciousness whereby each individual finds the hub of reality in him/herself, in his/her own ego. His poem “ New Heaven and Earth”charts the violation of the distinctions between self and other, lover and beloved, even creator and created, as a result of the appropriation of each of the second term by the first one:

When everything was me, I knew it all already, I anticipated it All in my soul;

Because I was the author and the result, I was the God and the creation at once;

Creator, I looked at my creation;

Created, I looked at myself, the creator:

It was a maniacal horror in the end.

I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved,

and God of horror, I was kissing also myself.

I was a father and a begetter of children,

And oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.

(CP 257)

Lawrence here presents the perverse energy enclosed in self-knowledge, self-love and self-creation. The articulation of solipsism reaches a horrified completion and climax in images of fertility— i.e., auto-eroticism leads to auto-conception.

In his critique of modern consciousness, Lawrence considered its split to be the result of an overemphasis on the logical, visual, and verbal processes associated with the head. In his opinion, both vision and language—or conceptual

thought—segment the fluctuating world. What is more, the privileging of these mental functions serves to entrench what is constructed by eye and intellect.

This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture. That is, he is a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest just setting, background . . . . This has been the development of the conscious ego in man . . . since Greece first broke the s pe l l of ‘ da r kne s s ’ . . . . Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight . . . . Like men in a dark room they only felt their own

existence surging in the darkness of other creatures. (P 523)

Lawrence understood the alienated ego as the product of verbal-conceptual thought;

the highly intellectual and visual culture has further reified the split within the self.

Like the horrified “ I”in the above poem, “ Ma n i s gi ve n up t o hi s dua l bus i ne s s , of

being . . . the living stuff of life itself, unrevealed; and of knowing. . . the manner of

that which has be e n, whi c h i s r e vea l e d” (STH 40-1). As a conscious ego, man is

thus burdened with the antinomic nature of his own existence—i.e., as both the

knowing subject and the object to be known.

For Lawrence, the possession of eyes suggests the facility to categorize, calibrate and fragment what is seen into sections and sectors. Metaphorically also, t he “ i nne r eye” s ugge s t s t he way t he br a i n c a n s upe r i mpos e i mage s of i t s own ma ki ng upon what the physical eye looks at. In “ Fantasia and Unconscious,”Lawrence uses the analogy of the tree, which “ had no face and no answer”(FU 45), to open his discussion of the tyranny of sight:

This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips or eyes or heart.

This towering creature that never had a face . . . he turns two ways: he thrusts himself tremendously down to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense undersoil; and he turns himself about in high air; whereas we have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards. (FU 43-4. Emphasis added.)

A tree, Lawrence thus claims, cannot be looked at and known; to relish its existence, one has to “ sit among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother”(FU 43). Since the tree has no eyes, it has no sectored vision either. Lawrence reflects how the Greeks and Romans sought in their philosophy to put a face on nature and natural objects, segmenting them into features and facial characteristics: “ Everything had a face, and a human voice. Men speak, and their fountains piped an answer”

(FU 45). On the contrary, the tree, as Lawrence describes it, grows according to a blind intuition which is immensely preferable to the limited linear eyesight of

“ seeing”creatures. Thus, trees emanate a sense of “ profound indifference,”because they possess a vastness of life that eludes human categorization and definition.

Lawrence’ s critique of the imperialist implication of vision has been given in many of his novels. For instance, it is manifest in Kate’ s reaction to Ramon and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent:

‘ Ah!’ she said to herself. ‘ Let me close my eyes to him, and open only

my soul. Let me close my pry, seeing eyes, and sit in dark stillness along with these two men . . . . The itching, prurient, knowing, imagining eye.

I am cursed with it, I am hampered up in it. It is my curse of curses, the curse of Eve. The curse of Eve is upon me, my eyes are like hooks, my knowledge is like a fish-hook through my gills, pulling me in spasmodic desire. (PS 184. Lawrence’ s italics. ).

This passage relates thematically to Lawrence’ s general view that sight is the most physically distanced of the senses and therefore closest to the abstraction of intellect, which has caused the alienating nature of modern consciousness. The regime of vision constitutes an appropriation of otherness, a refusal to allow the other to be other.

Doubtlessly, Lawrence criticizes the tyranny of sight mainly because it is related to the light of reason which, in shedding its rays, appropriates and thereby abolishes things. Since the eyes are, in purely physical terms, the most elevated of our senses, they are conventionally linked with rational understanding, as suggested by the conventional metaphor “ understanding is seeing.” Visuality is thus linked to rationality. Denying the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses, the Socratic eye is engaged in the production of knowledge, wherein the getting of wisdom is based on the doctrine of recollection. That is, the knower seeks to understand and to integrate their external world in terms familiar to the self. Denouncing the Socratic model of knowing, Lawrence declares: “ Know thyself! Which means, really, know thine own unknown self. It’ s not good knowing something you know already”(P 719). Being extraordinarily sensitive to the otherness lying beyond boundaries of man’ s conscious mind, Lawrence is suspicious of the Socratic model of ethics which is based on epistemology—i.e., the more you understand, the more virtuous you are.

For Lawrence, quite the contrary, any system of values or code of ethics that we

construct must acknowledge “ the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal morality greater than ever the human mind can grasp”(STH 29).

In a more determinate tone, Levinas also advises the similar caution that concepts discovered within the self would not alter the self or the world because they woul d me di a t e one’ s r e l at i on t o e xt e r na l be i ng by di s s ol vi ng i t s a l t e r i t y . Taking a step farther than Lawrence, Levinas specifically formulates a difference or an otherness that exceeds the totality of the visual, and in doing so challenges the privileging of the subject of light. His proposition of an otherness that transcends egological existence is thematized in the face. Taken from the vocabulary of vision and light, the face manifests that which transcends the light. Therefore, the

Levinasian face must be divorced from the Hegelian specularity of intersubjective recognition. Instead, Levinas considers the face as an irreducible other, which eludes the speculation of the gaze:

The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. (TI 50-1) Thus, for Levinas, there is no encounter of presence in the face. It is, beyond the egoism of existence, a visitation unpresupposable within the visible world.

However, in attempting to philosophisize without light, Levinas is confronted at the outset with a certain dilemma indicated by Derrida: “ It is difficult to maintain a philosophical discourse against light”(VM 85-6). In order to attack the use of the metaphor of the sun in Western thought, which associates illumination with

intelligibility, possession and apprehension, Levinas attempts to propose a sense of