<snip>
"In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his body, there had
started another activity. It was as if a strong light were burning
there, and he was blind within it, unable to know anything, except
that this transfiguration burned between him and her, connecting them,
like a secret power." [DHL]
I reacted violently against that sort of language ("sloppy!
seat-sniffing! ridiculous!") when I first read it as a teenager, and
still react strongly to it now albeit in different ways. [DF]
<snip>
I suspect that the insufficiencies of sequences such as 'breast... bowels...
somewhere' and (in this excerpt) those strong, burning lights within which
one is blind are _not_ the product of sloppiness as such; they are far too
loopy for that, the Kerouac uneditedness (avant la lettre) notwithstanding.
Here, for example, is Lawrence on Ruskin as though upon himself: 'The deep
damnation of self-righteousness... lies thick all over the Ruskinite, like
painted feathers on a skinny peacock' On the one hand John Cleese shouting
the odds about dead parrots; on the other, somewhere in Stackton Tressle,
Mesdames Hinge & Bracket trying desperately to resuscitate a fallen budgie
by means of artificial respiration injudiciously applied. Dehiscence indeed.
Or, to put that quite another way, Lawrence is (in effect) a very camp
writer with absolutely _no_ sense of camp. Yes: 'not exactly conventionally
masculine', but (of course) that isn't the flaw. So imagine a dinner party
somewhere in Bloomsbury. McGonnagall appears, spindly, naked, bearing a
miner's lamp, and shouting bollocks (in both senses) in a ridiculous lingo
that combines bad Ruskin with bad Pater ('life as a species of flame', to
lift a phrase from the article). The counterpart, in its own peculiar way,
of Pollock pissing in the fireplace.
Lawrence never resolves in a useful way whatever it is he is doing: word
painting? using language to *access* the sensations of being alive? using it
to *ignite* or *prompt* those sensations? or *revealing* them negatively
through distancing and estrangement? So the prose ends up earnest rather
than serious, sexualised rather than erotic.
Compare John Hawkes, for example, who (in my reading) is extremely camp:
'The rectal pressure was increasing, the sound of breathing ceased, in the
midst of his shock and pleasure he was now refusing what was inside himself,
fighting the greedy mouth as the child fights his bladder in the night. But
then it began, in darkness and in the midst of what sounded like distant
shouting, that long uncoiling of the thick white thread from the bloody
pump, that immense and fading constriction of white light inside the flesh.'
What you learn from the Lawrence passage is the deleterious effect of
literary models. What you learn from Hawkes is not merely that Hawkes has,
on occasions, had sex; but also that Hawkes has had other experiences, such
as the sudden withdrawal of sound, the slowing down of films and the
scariness of feeling hopelessly separated from one's more active self.
And so, because (like several others here) I am prejudiced about Lawrence,
here is something Alison wrote a few days ago in re bunraku:
<snip>
personally the most powerful puppet theatre I've seen is the bun raku,
"white" theatre in which the manipulators are visible. [AC]
<snip>
I agree with Alison's sense of its power. However, the puppeteers aren't
quite 'visible' but rather dressed in black and thus _visibly unseen_,
exemplifying *ma* (the space between), in which being 'alive' on the stage
is less a matter of continuity, more a matter of discrete interventions into
not-being-there, as when light punctuates darkness. (Tanizaki is good on the
latter, if I remember.)
It's that sort of sense (that not everything is possible all at once, nor
should it be) of which Lawrence seems entirely unaware.
CW
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'Think of a book inflicted on its author...' (Alan Sondheim)
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