Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Lady Chatterley’s Lover 87
That a revolution in the passional lives of men and women
must precede the establishment of the good society; and that this
change, though in one sense revolutionary, will require a return to
mythic origins, to the human condition that prevailed before some
aboriginal catastrophe, is not doctrine peculiar to Lawrence. An
obvious ancestor, among other, is Nietzsche; but such motions were
in the air. The “dissociation of sensibility,” to use Eliot’s term, is an old
doctrine, and Lawrence knew it very early, perhaps as early as 1906, if
that was the year in which he told Jessie Chambers that there could
never be another Shakespeare, for Shakespeare was the product of an
integrated age, whereas “things are split up now.” 5 Early in 1929 he
wrote an introduction to a projected book on his paintings, and in
this extraordinary essay he found occasion to examine the nature of
the dissociation in more historical detail. The reason why the English
cannot paint is fear, fear of life; and Lawrence, now arguing that this
fear is already visible in Shakespeare, dates it from the Renaissance,
and specifically from the syphilis epidemic of the sixteenth century.
“But with the Elizabethans the grand rupture had started in the
human consciousness” (Phoenix, 552). The division between mental
and physical consciousness was established; sex was associated with
terror, and intuitive awareness of other people, and of nature, was
lost. The art of the eighteenth century is optical rather than intuitive,
the body disappears from painting; even the French Impressionists
escaped into light. The chaos of modernism begins in this terror.
Lawrence is particularly hard on Significant Form, a Bloomsbury
doctrine. What he recounts “is the nauseating and repulsive history
of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the
spirit, the mental consciousness. . . . The Renaissance put the spear
through the side of the already crucified body, and syphilis put poison
into the wound made by the imaginative spear. . . . We . . . were born
corpses” (569). Cezanne moved the stone from the door of the tomb,
but the critics rolled it back; and English artists have reached a condition
of death, whether or not this is a prelude to rebirth.
Here we have a new historical version of Lawrence’s myth of the
lost paradise, of the forfeited blood-consciousness and the closed
imaginative eye. Such myths are normally inspired by a strong sense of
the desperate need of one’s own epoch, and Lawrence’s is certainly no
exception to the rule. He wrote Lady Chatterley and A Propos as contributions
to an urgently needed passional revolution. His metaphysic