Destructive and Reconstructive Knowledge in Lawrence and Eliot

[Note the highlighted strong verbs throughout the introduction; very few linking verbs -- MW]
[See further below for an exemplary close reading]

    In his essay "The Resurrection of the Body," D. H. Lawrence addresses a society recovering from the first World War, a society whose truths have been destabilized, a society in desperate need of reinventing itself through the discovery of new truths; in its vision of a truly resurrected Christ, "The Resurrection of the Body" illustrates society's need to abandon the ideals represented in the traditional idea of the Resurrection as documented by the Bible, and to establish a Truth based on "the image of our inward state to-day" (Lawrence, "Resurrection," 922).  Lawrence's Women in Love dramatizes this idea of a society in search of new truths, elaborating further the notion of God reinvented through man's experience.  In the novel's Exeunt, Birkin comes to the "consoling" conclusion that "God can do without man," a conclusion that leaves him with the notion that mankind must become its own God, must fashion, through "the timeless creative mystery . . . some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation"  (Lawrence, Women, 478-79).  This model of thinking creates a filter through which to view the troubled characters' lives and the troubled society in which they live, an echo of hope that resonates back through the novel, reinventing the progression toward the characters' tragedy as a simultaneous progression toward the "miraculous unborn species" that will succeed them and their society (Lawrence, Women, 479).  The veiled optimism that concludes Women in Love novel forms a stark contrast to other Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a work that reaches much darker conclusions about the fate of humanity.  Like Lawrence, Eliot too seems to believe that "God can do without man," but he sees no such hope in the prospect of man's self-reinvention; filled with "broken images" of rebirth, The Waste Land illustrates the impotence of man's attempts at regeneration, the haunting indifference of man to his own downfall, and the idea that even God may be too late to save man from destruction.  In these two modernist treatises, society is broken down into isolated fragments that struggle to add themselves into a coherent whole; though neither narrative describes the success of such a struggle, they offer widely varying ideas on the nature and value of that struggle.

        In the almost exact middle of Women in Love, Birkin contemplates the African fetishes he saw at Halliday's, and ruminates on the differences between African ideas of destruction and those of the white races: "The white races, having the arctic north behind them . . . would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation.  Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction" (Lawrence, Women, 254).  Birkin means to evoke this kind of destruction in his own life, in order to tear down his world and rebuild one that is "deeper, darker than ordinary life;" in referring to them as "abstractions," however, Birkin rejects these two accepted modes of destruction as oversimplifications, as ideas that purport to be the end results of "the happy creative being," simple visions of destruction that seem to be different but are actually the same "knowledge of dissolution . . . African . . . but different in us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north" (Lawrence, Women, 254).  Birkin then goes on to question society's fate in accepting such simplified notions of the world's end, of participating in the "process of frost-knowledge," through the contemplation of Gerald, Lawrence's representative of the modern industrial society (Lawrence, Women, 254).  In seeing Gerald's "death by perfect cold," Birkin is not only foreshadowing Gerald's very literal end, but he is also illustrating his fear that such an end would be a finality beyond which nothing could be rebuilt,  a "universal dissolution into whiteness and snow" (Lawrence, Women, 254).

        Eliot, too, explores the varying ends of the Earth in The Waste Land, and uncovers a similar idea of final, irreversible destruction; in his work, however, Eliot dramatizes the idea of "universal dissolution" through the degenerating voices that make up the text, rather than call forth abstract ideas from the mind of a confused and inconsistent character.  The Waste Land begins with a voice recounting leisurely seasons past, including a variety of activities, culminating in the description of a childhood sled-ride: "he took me out on a sled, / And I was frightened" (Eliot, Waste, 14-15).  Though this parallels the statement immediately following Birkin's contemplation of ice-destruction, "Birkin was frightened," Eliot twists the meaning of both fear and "frost-knowledge" in the line that follows almost immediately: "In the mountains, there you feel free" (Lawrence, Women, 254; Eliot, Waste, 17).  Here, Eliot is immediately establishing a connection between fear and freedom, a fear of the responsibility and weight of decisions that must necessarily be made in a state of freedom.

        This fear of freedom is dramatized in the poems' characters who continually retreat into mechanized routines; following her past-tense reminiscence, the narrator at the beginning of the poem jumps into present tense with the line "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter," capsulizing her present life in terms of a simple pattern that alternates between night and winter (Eliot, Waste, 18).  The routine itself reveals an even deeper avoidance of the freedom found in the cold winters of the speaker's childhood, in that the character travels south to avoid winter's cold, successfully negating the conditions by which she first felt free.  A fear of freedom means a fear of decision, and a consequent dearth of action or movement; the universal stagnancy that results from this dearth is a problem with which the voices of The Waste Land grapple either weakly or not at all: two women talk casually of the five abortions which one of them has had; a woman reacts with "indifference" to the "unreproved, if undesired" sexual advances of an "expected guest;" Madame Sosostris prophesies the death of a man, "by water," before accepting money and passing along a cordial message to a mutual acquaintance of herself and her silent audience (Eliot, Waste, 55, 230, 238, 239).

        Birkin grapples heavily and deeply throughout Women in Love with the problem of love and truth, of fear and freedom.  What Birkin discovers, through the tragedy of Gerald's death, is a hope for the rebirth of society beyond its destruction.  In turning down Birkin's offer of love, Gerald is unable to "live still in the beloved;" as a representative of mainstream society, Gerald is kept from loving fully by the outmoded truths that control him, and thus unable to live on in Birkin, to be reborn: "he was dead, like clay, like bluish, corruptible ice . . . He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat" (Lawrence, Women, 480).  Lawrence explores similar ideas of rebirth in "Resurrection of the Body," using a religious connotation to illustrate the idea of reinventing the idea of Truth.  Lawrence establishes, in the essay, that the Resurrection of Christ is the most powerful model of the Christian doctrine, more relevant than the idea of the Christ-child or Christ Crucified to a post-war society badly in need of "some vision of himself" to renew a world in which the old truths have been shattered by war.  It is not enough, however, to accept the doctrine that "we rise with Him [Christ] in the body;" the doctrine itself must be retooled in order to reflect the experience of modern times:

Christ risen in the full flesh!  What for?  It is here the gospels are all vague and faltering, and the Churches leave us in the lurch.  Christ risen in the flesh in order to lurk obscurely for six weeks on earth, then be taken vaguely up into heaven in a cloud?  Flesh, solid flesh, feet and bowels and teeth and eyes of a man, taken up into heaven in a cloud, and never put down again?
       It is the only part of the great mystery which is all wrong. The virgin birth, the baptism, the temptation, the teaching, Gethsemane, the betrayal, the crucifixion, the burial and the resurrection, these are all true according to our inward experience.  They are what men and women go through, in their different ways.  But floated up into heaven as flesh-and-blood, and never set down again – this nothing in all our experience will ever confirm.  If aeroplanes take us up, they bring us down, or let us down.  Flesh and blood belong to the earth, and only to the earth.  We know it. (Lawrence, "Resurrection," 921-22)

Thus, Lawrence begins his reinvention of Truth by tearing down the old and establishing the new: "if Jesus rose as a full man, in full flesh and soul, then He rose to take a woman to Himself . . . to know the tenderness and blossoming of the twoness with her, He who had been hitherto so limited to His oneness" (Lawrence, "Resurrection," 922).  This is the same kind of reinvented truth that Birkin struggles with in his attempts to love Ursula and Gerald; his idea of "an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:– as the stars balance each other" is a kind of rediscovery of the traditional ideas of marriage and brotherhood in much the same way that a Resurrected Christ would rediscover the traditional life of everyday man in Lawrence's rewritten gospel, a tradition freed of its "self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-importance . . . [and] self-sacrifice" (Lawrence, Women, 148; "Resurrection," 922).  Indeed, the entirety of "Resurrection of the Body" can be seen as a parallel for Birkin's notion of the "eternal creative mystery" at the end of Women in Love that "would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation;" Christ, in Lawrence's view, has "failed creatively to develop," and so is dispensed by Lawrence, the controlling "creative mystery" behind the essay, and replaced with a Christ who "rose to do His share in the world's work, something He really liked doing" (Lawrence, Women, 478-79; "Resurrection," 922).

        Eliot concerns himself, too, with the idea of resurrection, in terms of both society and religion.  The first few lines of the poem are used to turn around one of the most basic tropes of literature: the idea of Spring as a time of birth, of light, of joy.  The traditional image of April is twisted, becoming "the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain" (Eliot, Waste, 1-4).  Though Eliot calls attention to Lilacs and spring rain, the overwhelming image is that of "dead land," of "dull roots," of "memory and desire" mixing into what could be read as "cruel" regret, or at the very least, nostalgia.  This stained image of rebirth sets the scene for what follows, a self-described "heap of broken images" that struggles for rebirth and finds, instead, "a handful of dust" (Eliot, Waste, 22, 30).  The final section includes a figure who may or may not be Christ himself, resurrected and walking among the characters of the poem:

 Who is the third who walks always beside you?
 When I count, there are only you and I together
 But when I look ahead up the white road
 There is always another one walking beside you
 Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
 I do not know whether a man or a woman
 – But who is that on the other side of you? (Eliot, Waste, 360-66)

In the speaker's inability to identify the cloaked stranger, the scene evokes the Bible story of Christ's apostles being unable to identify him after he has been resurrected.  In the notes to the poem, however, Eliot reveals that this scene is based upon an Antarctic expedition whose members, at the limits of endurance, swore that there was always one more member than they could count (Eliot, "Notes," 73).  A combination of these two references seems to indicate that this image of Christ resurrected is nothing more than a delusion, brought about by the decaying condition of mankind.  The idea of Christ as delusion is elaborated further by the note's subtle reference back to the snow-blanketed environs of the poem's beginning, recalling the fear of freedom established there.  In this way, Christ becomes an emblem for man's dependence upon religion to quell his fear of freedom by making decisions for him.

        Toward the end of the poem, the speaker considers a boat that "respond[s] / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar / The sea was calm, your heard would have responded / Gaily, when invited, beating obedient / To controlling hands" (Eliot, Waste, 419-23); the sentiment of these lines, a seeming testament to the joy of being led by a higher power's control, is subverted by the conditional tense with which the speaker refers to "you."  In saying "you would have responded," a question of condition is raised: what is keeping "you" from responding?  If the rest of the poem is to be used as precedent, with endless examples of dead and dying things, it is obvious that "you" is dead, and that whatever higher power to which "you would have responded / Gaily" is powerless to bring "you" back (Eliot, Waste, 421-22).  The water that the speaker desperately seeks throughout "What the Thunder Said," when it finally comes, does no good to those who are already dead; in fact, the arrival of the rain only seems to intensify the speaker's isolation as one who is already marked for death: "to be found in our obituaries / Or in the memories draped by the beneficent spider . . . in our empty rooms . . . each in his prison" (Eliot, Waste, 407-12).  Even in the presence of supposedly rejuvenating forces, there is no resurrection at the end of The Waste Land, but a confused descent into what Eliot translates in the Notes as "The Peace which passeth understanding:"

                        I sat upon the shore
 Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
 Shall I at least set my lands in order?
 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
 Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
 Quando fiam uti chelidon – O swallow swallow
 Le Prince d'Aqutaine à la tour abolie
 These fragments I have shored against my ruins
 Why then Ile fit you.  Hieronymo's mad againe.
 Datta.  Dayadhvam.  Damyata.
               Shantih shantih shantih (Eliot, Waste, 424-34)

The poem collapses in these final lines, collapses language, collapses physical structures, collapses communication, collapses the speaker's will to live; "The Peace which passeth understanding" can only be death, from which The Waste Land provides no escape (Eliot, "Notes," 74).  In his essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth," Eliot stresses the importance of Joyce's using "the myth . . . manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" as "a way . . . of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history;" Eliot, too, uses myth to shape The Waste Land, in referencing other works and other languages in a pattern that rises and falls like the tide, eventually crashing upon the "arid plain" of the final scene (Eliot, "Ulysses," 177; Waste, 425).  In this way, Eliot denounces even his own belief in classicism, in resurrecting old literature for use in the new; the "heap of broken images" that begins The Waste Land becomes nothing more than "fragments . . . shored against . . . ruins" (Eliot, Waste, 22, 431).  At the edges of The Waste Land, the universe entire breaks down, meaning a "universal dissolution" of the text itself "into whiteness and snow" (Lawrence, Women, 254).  Lawrence himself might see, in Eliot, a perfect representation of Gerald, doomed to a "snow abstract annihilation" at the hands of his own "ice-destructive knowledge" (Lawrence, Women, 254).
 
  Works Cited

 Eliot, T. S.  The Waste Land from Selected Poems.  Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1930.  1-4, 14-15, 17, 18, 22, 30, 55, 230, 238, 239, 360-66, 407-12, 419-23, 424-34;  "Notes on The Waste Land:" pgs. 73, 74.

 Eliot, T. S.  "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot.  Frank Kermode, ed.  London : Faber and Faber, 1975.  177.

 Lawrence, D. H.  "Resurrection of the Body," from The Modern Tradition.  Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., ed.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.  921-922.

 Lawrence, D. H.  Women in Love.  London: Penguin Books, 1995.  478-79, 254, 480.