D.H.Lawrence

Topic started by Vishvesh Obla (@ nas-70-195.albany.navipath.net) on Sat Nov 18 22:04:37 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

D.H.Lawrence is perhaps one of the most misunderstood writers of the literary world. A novelist he basically was, he was very un-conventional from the literary stream. This un-conventionality is seen in most of the great writers who had something original to say that their works become diverse complex forms of expression. But Lawrence is baffling, for he seems to have had some of the primordial modes of human perception that the human race has forgotten. He is, hence, either as a Savage, and is, condemnatory or a kind of seer or even visionary. Both of these estimates are very common with him which stand in our way to a proper understanding of him.

It cannot be denied that all through his works we find something at a level more than the normal level of human understanding and perception. Lawrence, for the first time in Literary History, starts talking about the issue of ‘human consciousness’ through the era of European history starting from the times of the great Greek Classicists. The consciousness in man has a comprehensive mode of experience that involves the fullest involvement of all the faculties that he is born with and which develops as he grows. The primary centers of consciousness shift at the different periods of one’s life but basically they all lead to a fulfillment of each other leading to an awareness which is not just mental but of the entire being itself. His novels are all portrayals of the stunted growth of such human consciousness found in our modern times. They find their culmination in his magnum opus, “Fantasia of the Unconscious”, where he discusses the various plexus and ganglions which are the seats of human consciousness, how they interact with each other leading to a fuller consciousness, how we jeopardize the natural harmony of them by our excessive emphasis on a few modes. Lawrence observes an altered pattern of the growth of human consciousness from the age of our reasoning, from the age of the great Greek philosophers, when man started becoming a sort of mental being. The Mind becomes the center of consciousness and all our conscience is MENTAL. We translate everything we come across into mental IDEAS that kill the kind of vital relation we could maintain earlier in our older civilizations. Even Sex, a great pre-mental force that is a vital source of life, is ‘mentalized’ so that it has lost its life and has become a matter of perversion in our modern times. (His “Lady Chatterley’s Lovers” is one of the sanest books written on men-women relations). Lawrence sees the Etruscans, the Chaldeans, the Aryans and many of the older civilizations having a kind of pre-mental knowledge of life which could offer them a better kind of life which was vitally related to all the things they were in touch with.

Now all this kind of stuff may sound abstract, but it is a question of attitudes one needs to take if one wants to read Lawrence. It is not a question of you believing him or not. It is a very serious question involving the very sanity of mankind and the basic convictions that something is seriously false with our lives. Lawrence will forever remain an enigma as long as we continue to produce more and more mental human beings that we all basically are. He gives us an opportunity to see through that veil that has kept us blind and to read him patiently and understand him rightly is only a question of one’s choice to remain sane or not...


But in Lawrence, it has been so pronounced in his works that he has remained so much an enigma to be either condemned as a savage with some primordial modes of perception


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