Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

64 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
he was!—saw personal growth and vitality in terms neither of selfabsorption
nor in a direct relationship with God. To be sure, there
is in his view of nature and natural forces something akin to Rousseau’s
peculiar brand of mysticism, 68 but Lawrence believed emphatically
that everything, even individuality itself, depended on
human relationship.
“ ‘What are you,’ ” he demanded, “ ‘when you’ve asserted your
grand independence, broken all the ties, or “bonds,” and reduced
yourself to a pure “individuality”?’ And his unequivocal answer is
echoed in much of his work: ‘Extremely little!’ 69
“All the same, Lawrence—like Rousseau and Kierkegaard—was
critical of the actual society he lived in. While believing in the necessity
of communion with others, he too cautioned against the
dangers to the individual self inherent in what has traditionally
been called the civilizing process.
“In a broad sense, I saw all three as rebels against reason, for
each was opposed to the contemporary mainstream. Not that they
denied the importance of reason or spurned its use. No, but each in
his own way questioned the assumption that reason per se is man’s
most precious asset: Rousseau by attacking social institutions;
Kierkegaard by stressing the primacy of faith and subjective truth;
and Lawrence by proclaiming the potential vitality in renewing
contact with a ‘lower’ consciousness.
“Each in his own time, you see, was an odd man out, a dissenter
from a collective climate of opinion that had its roots in the Enlightenment
and which to this day, I believe, determines the nature
of Western society.”
The discerning reader will have heard in the foregoing, as did I,
echoes of Brillig’s earlier revelations in the sun room. I do not
mind saying that at this point tears sprung to my eyes. I was filled
with an entirely new feeling. I could think of no name for it—
something between mystery and hope.
68 “The element of organic union is strong in both,” said Brillig later, “but Rousseau’s
approach to nature is gentle, almost sentimentall, while Lawrence seems to
embrace nature with a fervor approaching physical lust.”
69 “We Need One Another,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence,
p. 189.