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Monday, May 22, 2006
Contra Lawrence
Well, and assuming I don’t mind being over-obvious, this one really does write itself. Birkin and Ursula are in conversation. It’s Women in Love, Chapter 11:
“So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?” said Ursula.
“I should indeed.”
“The world empty of people?”
“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”
The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And really it was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable.
The appropriate critical response here, naturally, is a shouty ‘No! No! No!’. Or alternatively, and to adopt the idiom of that lanky and sarcastic house-doctor from Scrubs, a ‘dear God No PLEASE JUST STOP’.
But, although it’s awkward for me to admit it, there is something more here. Perhaps it’s just me, but I have to concede that this revoltingly Pol Pot sentiment is articulated via a striking and rather beautiful image. There’s something poetic, something memorable about that hare. There’s a small part of me that responds to the poetry in the same way Ursula does (‘And really it was attractive…’).
I think it has something to do with the present-day ubiquity of Green and environmentalist concerns, something I take seriously, but which, for better or worse, seems to me to have become rather overwhelmed by a quasi-Lawrentian idiom.
Of course, as far as raising a cry contra Lawrence goes, I need to acknowledge that this is one of Lawrence’s characters speaking, not Lawrence himself. But then again, as somebody once said, we should trust the tale, not the teller. And the tale here is all about how there is “no dignity of human life now”:
“And why is it,” she asked at length, “that there is no flowering, no dignity of human life now?”
“The whole idea is dead. Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really. There are myriads of human beings hanging on the bush—and they look very nice and rosy, your healthy young men and women. But they are apples of Sodom, as a matter of fact, Dead Sea Fruit, gall-apples. It isn’t true that they have any significance—their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.”
Lawrence’s own insides were actually full of corruption, of course, if the tuberculus bacterium (which would, I suppose, be one of the organisms left in the world picked clean of Birkin’s vision) can be thought of as ‘corruptive’, which, in a strict sense of the word, it clearly can. But he’s not talking about that sort of inner corruption. He’s talking about a sort of spiritual decay, an immerding of the soul that results in ‘clean’ ‘natural’ energies, like sex, becoming shamefully dirtied. Lawrence, as every schoolchild knows, set himself the task of challenging that; putting the reverence and spontaneity and dark joy back into shagging.
When I were a lad, by gum, Lawrence still retained some of his glamour as a sexily transgressive writer. This is Britain in the 1970s we were talking about, when erotica was hard to find, and when even if you did stumble upon some it was guaranteed to be rubbish. 1963’s Chatterley trial still resonated, not so much as an iconic moment in the cause of freedom of speech as the facilitator of sexual explicitness in books. We had, many people thought, Lawrence to thank for that.
One consequence of this was the unseemly spectacle of every goatee’d university lecturer in his forties possessed of a leather jacket using Lawrence as a pretext to try and seduce their students. But to hold Lawrence responsible for this would be a cheap shot indeed, and unjustified to boot. Indeed, in the clear white light of our elevated twenty-first century perspective, it might be said that he was clearly right about sex: that seeing sex as seedy and dirty was a grotesque category error that caused misery for millions. Provided only that it be consensual, we now see, sex is a Good Thing. Or to rephrase this in Lawrentian terms, provided only that it be clean, sex is a great and powerful thing (let us make our sacrifices to the subterranean gods and clasp the suave loins of darkness etc etc). How to demur from this without sounding prudish?
I suppose his stock isn’t as high as it once was; but once-upon-a-critical-time D H Lawrence was taken to be a great writer; and many people read him specifically as a purveyor of superior and profound erotica. But his writing is not erotica. It is porn—which is to say it objectifies sex rather than stimulating a properly intersubjective sensuality. Where common-or-garden porn objectifies bodies, usually female bodies, Lawrence objectifies a notional cleanness of erotic contact: or to put it another way, although conventional porn is interested only in the outsides of its actants, Lawrence is interested, weirdly, only on their spiritual innards, and more specifically on how clean those spiritual innards are. But this is just as limited, just as anti-human. But sexual relations really cannot bear very much cleanness. ‘Do you consider sex to be dirty?’ Woody Allen was once asked, to which, famously, he replied, ‘only if it’s done right’.
So there’s that hare, still sitting tumescently up. I think it’s the implied movement of the image that gives it its heft: ‘a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up’. Which is to say, an image that starts with an emptiness, something static and finished, yet which seems as we read it somehow in movement as if the point of view (but whose? all the people are gone!) rushes over acres and acres of clean green grassland coming to stop eventually at that upsitting hare.
For Lawrence his imaged sexual ‘cleanness’ was intimately bound up with notions of nature. But … nature? There may be readers of the Valve (I don’t know …) for whom the whole higher eclectic theoretical circus is wholly irredeemable, but one thing for which I personally will forever thank Foucault and his Followers is creating an intellectual climate in which one can only deploy the word ‘natural’ in inverted commas. Nature, schmature.
Plenty of people today don’t agree with that, I know. Plenty of people find in Nature a genuine authenticity and a root-point of not only social ethics but of personal fulfilment and sexual desire. Lawrence’s hare, in other words, entails a larger question, one more current today than the old debates about whether sex was good or bad. Ideologies of ‘cleanness’ have infected the present-day Green and environmentalist discourses. I don’t say this to indulge in stupid of Big Business Green-bashing. Personally I believe that those discourses are the most important ones for the practical future of our world. Lawrence predated the Green revolution of course; but I like to think he would enthusiastically have endorsed many environmentalist positions. Because like him, many Greens see human beings essentially as pollutants, as unclean figures messing up what would otherwise be a pristine world. Like them, I have no desire to live in a world in which sea levels are 40-ft higher than they are today, or in which biodiversity is a quaint historical notion; but I still read about Lawrence’s eminently Green-extreme hare up-sitting whose rabbity eyes can see no people at all, hurrah!, and feel the urge to shout ‘No—No—No!’
Comments
This is definitely a more literal approach to literary criticism than is normally done.
I’m of the opinion that the end of the human race exceeds all possible moral categories—as in, if I were in a situation such that I could choose to halt the end of the world or not, it would make no sense to say that it would be “immoral” to choose to let it happen. This doesn’t seem to be some kind of off-beat oddball opinion—couldn’t it be seen as a kind of reductio ad absurdum to the notion that the greatest good is the elimination of suffering? Thus maybe the end of the world would even be a good thing!
It takes a lot of nerve to really, honestly say “yes” to this world as it is—think of Nietzsche and the initial horror of the idea of the eternal return. This doesn’t mean that radical environmentalism is right, of course, just that you might want to tarry a little more with the initial seductiveness of the idea of the open field and the hare.
(By “end of the world,” I mean “end of the human world,” since it seems to me that it would not make sense to talk in terms of “world” without any human beings.)
I was an angsty, “l’enfer, c’est les autres” early-twentysomething when I read Women in Love, and at the time, I felt profound empathy toward and identification with Rupert Birkin. I still do, to an extent. Not “the appropriate critical response,” I know, but there it is.
There is nothing as evanescent as an authorial attempt to use sexual transgression. Can anyone think of an author whose reputation survives using it? It always seems like a few decades later, the work appears highly dated. James Branch Cabell tried this in his day, and it worked for a while—there was a censorship scandal around his book _Jurgen_, which as a result was highly reprinted (you can still see many versions at used book stores with odd phallic drawings on the covers that were once supposed to look daring and now look merely stupid). But _Jurgen_ wasn’t his best work, and few now have heard of Cabell, even though he really was a great fantasist. In a strange illustration of historical changes in supply and demand, you can now buy used Cabell hardcovers from the 1920s and 1930s for less than what a new paperback version of one of his books costs.
As for the whole cleanliness / Lawrence / Nature connection, there’s so much else going on there that I don’t see Lawrence as being that important an example of it. Since I live in New England, I’m used to the phenomenon of poets not being able to step out of doors without being buzz-bombed by some sort of Transcendental-heritage inspiration fron nature. Isn’t Lawrence’s cleanliness just Godliness reworked, after people have given up on taking it too literally? Apples of Sodom are the countervailing figure, after all.
Adam K. “...you might want to tarry a little more with the initial seductiveness of the idea of the open field and the hare”
Well exactly. It is seductive, that’s what I’m saying. But it’s not seductive on its own terms: cleanness is a human category, after all, not a natural one (Nature doesn’t care if she’s clean; Nature doesn’t care in any sense. It’s people who care). Birkin’s isn’t a clean thought—that hare sitting up has probably been eating its own poo, and, I daresay, it’s own young. The people Lawrence despaired of didn’t go that far. Actually, I suppose Birkin’s is a clean thought, for him; but he and Ursula aren’t thinking about a clean world, the way they pretend they are, because when the humans go then so do their strange conceptual categories.
Which is by way of saying, I don’t see how it’s possible actually to say yes to the end of the human world. That’s a possibility that exists hermetically outside human discourse, the way that Heidegger says our own deaths exist outside our Daseins. (Is that the plural? Daseinen? Or maybe it doesn’t come in the plural). Which may, when you say it exceeds all categories, be what you’re suggesting in the first place.
“Think of Nietzsche and the initial horror of the idea of the eternal return” ... yes, although Nietzsche’s groundhog point about his groundhog return was that we need to get to that groundhog place where we joyously affirm our hamsterwheel existence. Just uninterupted grass and a moustacheoed German philosopher leaping up ...
Do you really think the world’s that bad, then? And is it the world that’s bad, or our originally sinning selves?
Rich: “There is nothing as evanescent as an authorial attempt to use sexual transgression.” This is clearly true. I’m also, rather uncomfortably, reminded of the bit in (I think) Nicholson Baker’s U and I where he lists those sex-scenes from Updike’s novels to which he has successfully masturbated. Yuk. On the other hand, isn’t there a danger in our automatic condescension to previous generations and their clearly repressed-and-inadequate sex lives? (it goes without saying thT nobody in the history of humanity has ever had sex as good as us). I suppose I’m perpetrating that idea in this post, but of course it’s wrong. You don’t think of your granny as a sexual being, but she’s almost certainly had much more sex than you and it’s probably been wilder than anything you’ve ever done. (Um, I mean a Prince Charles-y ‘one’ here instead of the you; I’m not speculating about your sex life, Rich). Which is to say, who are we to patronise Cabell? Maybe the readers of his generation wanking to Jurgen had a much more intense release than Nicholson Baker and his sticky copies of the Rabbit books.
I’m pretty sure Dasein only comes in the singular. You might be able to change it to a present participle and make it plural, though—Daseienden, maybe. (Daseiende? It always seems so random how the Germans inflect their nouns and adjectives.)
Maybe I’m too much of a Christian about all this, but I feel like a world in which the Holocaust happened, for example, is pretty bad—and there’s just been more and more since then (though hopefully never again anything that’s that bad in that particular way). Or the fact that millions of children starve to death because it’s more profitable for Americans to throw out half the food on their plate than for us to ship the food over there, or allow for livable subsistence agriculture. It’s not a matter of some mystical theological idea of original sin as a penumbra of badness surrounding humanity—objectively speaking, we seem to have made the world a pretty ugly and evil place, and I don’t see any immediate solutions.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I’ve always had something of an apocalyptic mindset—which is not to say that the UN is the Antichrist or whatever.
But I’ve also argued against radical environmentalists that things are so bad now that it would actually take further human intervention (of a certain kind) to fend off environmental collapse. (Not that I’m hopeful the idiots who are running the place can actually be bothered to do so.) So take that for what it’s worth.
(Perhaps only tangentially relevant: Once when joking about Liebniz’s idea that we’re necessarily in the best of all possible worlds—an idea that strikes me as laughable on its face—I said, “You think this is bad—you should have seen the worlds that were rejected!")
"On the other hand, isn’t there a danger in our automatic condescension to previous generations and their clearly repressed-and-inadequate sex lives?”
I’m not sure if that’s precisely it. There may or may not be much generational difference in what people actually do (well, actually I think that there is, what with birth control and increasing wealth and all that), but in terms of how explicitly you can *write* about what people do, there seems to have been a more or less monotonically increasing liberalization that makes each successive depiction appear dated.
Maybe I’m too much of an atheist about it all, and there’s no question some very bad things have happened in recent history. But by any of the criteria you can concoct (infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy levels, nutrition, political rights) things are better than they’ve ever been. This isn’t my sunny optimism projecting itself onto the wider world; I have neither sunshine nor optimism in my disposition [/snarl/] I’m sorry to say. Rather this is according to the Global Social Change Research Project, who calculate that most of the indicators of quality of life have improved across the board over the last decades, and all of them have mostly improved. There’s every reason, short of catastrophic collapse, to believe that this will continue. Not the best of all possible worlds certainly, but a better one than it’s ever been, and continuing to get better. So why the gloom? (I don’t just mean why your gloom, and why Lawrence’s gloom; I mean why so much gloom from so many affluent well-fed Westerners?)
Clancy, when you say
“I felt profound empathy toward and identification with Rupert Birkin. I still do, to an extent. Not ‘the appropriate critical response,’ I know, but there it is."
do you mean inappropriate in a ‘rhetoric and feminism’ sense (has feminist lit-crit ever gotten past its wholly justified using of DHL as the punching bag?) Or in a ‘I still think hell’s other people! hell is other people, dammit! Give me rabbits I tell ya!’ sense
Adam, I’m pretty sure people were saying the same kinds of things around the turn of the 20th century.
I’ve a prejudice you don’t like this word, but with what evidence? Besides, they may well have been right: increases in agricultural productive power, in technology, the introduction of pain relief and much better medical knowledge, much further along the way to universal suffrage, the intellectual climate that lead to the welfare state: this was Britain in 1900, not in 1800.
Actually I expected you to tut-tut at me for implicitly reducing happiness to purely material criteria.
It should be obvious from what I’ve said that my standards for human evil are very material—suffering and impoverishment, as opposed to something like “those damn gays” or people not going to church. (I suspect, though, that I’m thinking more explicitly in terms of “justice” than simple pleasure and pain.)
Our achievements in the field of human happiness seem to be gravely disproportionate to the increase in human power or capability—particularly how widely and evenly that happiness is distributed. And in any event, your account of sunny happy progress seems to be omitting the fact that we’ve made unparalled strides in the destruction and squandering of the earth and its resources—although in all fairness, perhaps that’s covered in the post itself.
It really goes against my grain to disagree with you, Adam. By which I mean I feel I should disagree, but my inner Grouch is going ‘he’s right, we’re all going to hell in yon handbasket’. But I guess my point would be that (if you’ll forgive a deliberate elision between author and character for a moment) when D H Lawrence looks around himself, sees crowds of beautiful, healthy and happy young people and goes ‘och you’re all apples of Sodom the lot of you’, that tells us a lot about DHL and very little about the people he’s observing.
(I didn’t mean “those damn gays or people not going to church”, by the way; I meant the notion that several, um, spritual people I know articulate to me sometimes, that all our material improvements not only don’t correlate to, but actually may be deleterious for, our spiritual wellbeing)
I meant “inappropriate” the same way you meant it in your post—that is, if I interpreted you correctly, which may or may not be the case. You said, “The appropriate critical response here, naturally, is a shouty ‘No! No! No!’. Or alternatively, and to adopt the idiom of that lanky and sarcastic house-doctor from Scrubs, a ‘dear God No PLEASE JUST STOP’.”
I took that to mean you were (sensibly) suggesting that Birkin’s position was too extreme, and that the appropriate critical response to any position stated in such extremes would be to protest loudly. So yeah, I suppose it is in the latter, “give me rabbits, I tell ya” sense, though not as extreme as I would have been in the early-twenties l’enfer days.
Also, I happen to be a feminist who loves DHL, what I’ve read of him anyway, which isn’t a whole lot: “Odor of Chrysanthemums,” Women in Love...that may be all. I’ll admit to not yet having read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, or Sons and Lovers.
”...there’s no question some very bad things have happened in recent history. But by any of the criteria you can concoct (infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy levels, nutrition, political rights) things are better than they’ve ever been. This isn’t my sunny optimism projecting itself onto the wider world; I have neither sunshine nor optimism in my disposition [/snarl/] I’m sorry to say. Rather this is according to the Global Social Change Research Project, who calculate that most of the indicators of quality of life have improved across the board over the last decades, and all of them have mostly improved. There’s every reason, short of catastrophic collapse, to believe that this will continue. Not the best of all possible worlds certainly, but a better one than it’s ever been, and continuing to get better. So why the gloom? (I don’t just mean why your gloom, and why Lawrence’s gloom; I mean why so much gloom from so many affluent well-fed Westerners?)”
Good point about the study, but take a look at your qualifier: “short of catastrophic collapse.” Means of nuclear, environmental, and bioWMD decimation leading directly to the elimination of the human species, let alone civilization, are possible today and in the immediate future that were not possible 50 years ago, let alone 100. No gloom in that? Of course I don’t know what gloom you refer to exactly. Gramsci seems to get it best to me: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Right now humanity is gambling recklessly with its very survival. That’s a new development (in the recent decades) that puts the global study that we should also be aware of in proper perspective. There are these great new threats (some of them decades old); the trends are not necessarily positive in regard to them; and it takes real action to address them, and some do act. And some think they do. And some apparently don’t care.
We should be clear that we know that we need to act, and that nothing short of survival is at stake. Again, this is a (_relatively_) new development. This means that we need to be clear that the trends in this regard are not necessarily going humanity’s way. In fact, talk of trends in this regard is irrelevant, since the whole apple cart can be upset at once no matter what direction it’s going until it’s pushed to far more stable ground—which is possible. The trends you mention may be seen as heartening, but they will all be for naught in a broad and ultimate sense if these other issues are not dealt with as well. (Of course addressing the criteria that you refer to far more adequately than currently, also helps to address the encompassing perilous context.)
couldn’t it be seen as a kind of reductio ad absurdum to the notion that the greatest good is the elimination of suffering?
A reductio? Isn’t it more or less Schopenhauer’s position?
I’m not a very spiritual person, nor am I especially religious. You’re right,however, insofar as I’m not convinced that all supposed material improvements represent an actual improvement.
Also, the evidence issue is a little beside the point. The people at the end of the 19th century wouldn’t have thought that the world was getting better and better if they didn’t have evidence that satisfied them—and from what I can tell, they were even right about that. But just projecting based on present trends is never going to allow you to predict that Europe would be destroyed, twice, within thirty years.
I’ve posted this before, but it seems pertinent:
From Stephen Potter’s “Lifemanship”:
“In Newstatesmaning the critic must always be on top of, or better than, the person criticised. Sometimes the critic will be of feeble and mean intelligence. The subject of his criticism may be a man of genius. Yet he must get on top. How? the layman asks.
By the old process - of going one better. Hope-Tipping of Buttermere had never really read a book since his schooldays, much less formed an original judgment. But he specialized in his own variations on the formula. He would skim some review dealing with the author involved, find the quality for which this author was most famous, and then blame him for not having enough of it.
H.-T. first made a name for himself in 1930 by saying that “the one thing that was lacking, of course, from D. H. Lawrence’s novels, was the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life.”
Get the Hope-Tipping angle. Talk about the almost open sadism of Charles Lamb, or about Lytton Strachey as a master of baroque. “The deep superficiality of Catullus” is Hope-Tipping’s, too. Never, by any shadow of a chance, was there a hint of cliché in the judgments of Hope-Tipping.”
The funny thing is: Hope-Tipping is so often right.
As to depopulating the world, I’ve posted about this before too, but it seems relevant. The Flaming Lips:
If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch
Would you do it?
If you could make everyobody poor just so you could be rich
Would you do it?
If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back
Would you do it?
If you could take all the love without giving any back
Would you do it?
And so we cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do…
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?
If you could make your own money and then give it to everybody
Would you do it?
If you knew all the answers and could give it to the masses
Would you do it?
No no no no no no are you crazy?
It’s a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want
Because you cannot know yourself or what you’d really do
With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
Which reminds me of a comic book I’m reading. Volume 1 of Bendis’ House of M series. The Scarlet Witch has gotten all omnipotent, has the power to rewrite reality and makes some poor, snap decisions about populations.
"H.-T. first made a name for himself in 1930 by saying that “the one thing that was lacking, of course, from D. H. Lawrence’s novels, was the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life.””
Hmmm. I believe I’ve heard that somewhere before.
And here. (Belle and I have been reading that book for years.)
Adam, is this why D. H. Lawrence was so interested in Australia, do you think? Terra Nullius and that.
German plurals seem random because they are. Technically speaking, almost all German nouns have irregular plurals; the regular ending (in the sense “governed by a rule”, to wit, “use it when you don’t have an ending on tap") is “-s”, which is quite rare; “Autos” and “Babys” are the only highly frequent nouns which use it. The seven other plural endings follow vague patterns, like English irregular verbs, but not anything you can count on.
In English we are used to the regular ending also being the common one. English has only about 30-40 irregular nouns in current use, plus of course all the Latin and Greek nouns that come into the language trailing their plurals behind them. But in German things are otherwise.
... mumble mumble Maori passives mumble mumble mumble ...
Are you serious? The technically “regular” plural ending is the one that’s used least? That fits my experience of the German language perfectly.
Since “-s” is also the regular genitive ending, and is actually used for that at least most of the time, this seems like an appropriate time to start up a comment thread fork on the necessity of abolishing the apostrophe in the English language:
“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of apostrophes, just uninterrupted letters, and a hare sitting up?”
I’m completely serious. You can read about it in the chapter on German in Stephen Pinker’s Words and Rules.
As for apostrophe abolition, Shaw was (as usual) ahead of his time: “[O]ne man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who
havnt and dont” --"The Apple Cart”.
Coming in late:
I think that the murderous hatred of the human race expressed by Lawrence’s character here was quite widespread at the end of the XIXc and the beginning of the XXc. (Below an example from Wittgenstein ca. 1946). The glee with which the majority of sensible, civil people on both sides greeted WWI is really hard to explain. To me this is the real problem of the XXc—the Nazis and the Holocaust are really just a late effect.
“The hysterical fear over the atom bomb being experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutaryhas been invented. The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: If this didn’t have something good about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, - our disgusting soapy water science (ekelhaften seifenwäßrigen wissenschaft). And certainly that’s not an unpleasant thought, but who can say what would come after this destruction? The people making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed.” (Culture and Value, tr. Winch, Chicago, 1988, p 48-9, 1946).
German plurals: my opinion is that for reading purposes they should be learned last, if at all. The meaning of the sentence rarely hinges on the number of an object. The form of the verb will tell you the numbers of the subjects, and often context or a number-word will disambiguate the objects.
Also, the presentation of these cumbersome and loony noun declensions as “rational” in German primary schools is the primary cause for German blind obedience to authority and insane seriousness. Only the addition of Wagner’s Ring cycle was required in order to bring Hitler to power.
That is one scary Wittgenstein quotation.
“The glee with which the majority of sensible, civil people on both sides greeted WWI is really hard to explain. To me this is the real problem of the XXc—the Nazis and the Holocaust are really just a late effect.”
There’s something very true and very worrying about this, I think; which is to say ‘I agree with John E’. Perhaps the thing that didn’t quite come across in my broderline-incoherent post was the part discourses of ‘cleanness’ played in the whole phenomenon. It is, when you think about it, really really bizarre that killing people has come to be thought of as in any sense a ‘clean’ or a ‘cleansing’ act. After all, it really isn’t a very clean thing to do: it’s physically unclean (there’s all the blood and evacuated bowels etc, and afterwards you’re left with meat that will soon start to decat decay; all of which means that killing people necessitates a literal cleaning up after it) and it’s symbolically unclean even if it is in some sense justified (I’m thinking here of e.g. the Oresteia). So how this doubly unclean activity gets turned around in the C20th so that millions believe that killing is clean thing to do is really headspinning.
I think this is preying on my mind because I’ve a four year old daughter, and I’m in the middle of that period when a parent inculcates behavioural standards in their children by invoking cleanliness. ‘Don’t do that [pick your bottom, lick that car bumber, rummage in the bin], it’s not clean.’ Which is good and necessary, but it’s a little spooky as well.
Perhaps it was the late C19th discovery of bacteria and microorganisms that enabled this Zardoz-discourse of ‘death is clean’. Killing bugs is ‘cleaning’ in a sense, after all; and maybe it was more than simple doublespeak for the Nazis to talk about Jews etc as ‘viruses’. The salient in the Lawrence quotation is the ‘world picked clean’; as if Lawrence is the daddy and is telling us ‘Dont do that [live bourgeois lives, enjoy cosy comforts, follow the old ways], that’s not clean.’
Laura: “Adam, is this why D. H. Lawrence was so interested in Australia, do you think? Terra Nullius and that.”
Yes, that’s right, but here I start to tie myself in knots; because I wonder whether Australia was too clean for DHL? I haven’t read The Boy in the Bush, but whilst Kangaroo is an interesting fiction it’s not as inspired and passionate as Plumed Serpent, because Dave can’t get quite as excited about Oz as he does about Mexico. I suppose Mexico has clean landscapes but also mysterious history, dark sexuality and religious cults with their roots in the subterranean powers etc etc.
Cancer surgery and disinfection metaphors recur in ethnic-cleansing and class-struggle propaganda.
Hygienic principles which were at first scientific later came to be worked into norms of bourgeois respectability and social climbing, where they developed an independent life with sometimes perverse medical effects.
For example, breast feeding (especially by immigrants, Negroes, et al) came to be thought of as unsanitary (this was entrenched by 1950, even though medicine already knew better—my father was an MD whose breast-feeding advocacy in a small midwestern town came to naught). And now we know that excessive cleanliness can lead to auto-immune diseases.
Likewise, genuine health practices (exercise and careful diet) are appropriated by the dating culture and accrue unhealthy practices like tanning and anorexia.