Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism

4 D. H. Lawrence’s Impersonal Imperative: Vision, Bodies, and the Recovery of Identity

I am sick and tired of personality in every way. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us. Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield, 12 December 1915 [W]e are none of us more than a cell in the eye-tissue . . . of the macrocosm, the universe. Lawrence, draft fragment of “John Galsworthy” Perhaps no modernist is so thoroughly associated with a concern to perceive and know through the body and the material world as D. H. Lawrence. In addition, perhaps no modernist has been read in such multitudinous and polemical ways with regard to this concern. Kate Millett, for instance, famously condemned Lawrence’s investment in embodiment as the shell for an essentializing patriarchy, while Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari just as famously championed his model of flows, vibrations, and circuits for refusing both a mind/body split and any notion of fixed essences. Anne Fernihough has explained this wide range of critical responses by pointing to Lawrence’s simultaneous use of conflicting notions of the organic, arguing that he effectively advances a protofascistic nativism and faith in semantic totality, on the one hand, and a canceling pluralistic belief in dynamism, material opacity , and rich polysemy, on the other. I posit here a slightly different economy for the aesthetic and ideological slipperiness of Lawrence’s understanding of materiality, even as I trace the key role that this slipperiness played in his related formulation of modernist impersonality. Lawrence’s adaptation of 4 D. H. Lawrence’s Impersonal Imperative Vision, Bodies, and the Recovery of Identity 172 Optical Impersonality modern science and intervention in a scientific vernacular of vision moved strategically both toward and against political conservatism, so that his writing highlights the spectrum of political possibilities Loy recognized in impersonality. Indeed, Lawrence uses the indeterminacy that marks impersonal subjectivity in the liberatory formulations of that aesthetic in order to keep more conservative notions of individuality and identity in play; he portrays these conservative notions as themselves part of indeterminacy and therefore of the shift and flux of subjectivity. Pushing this strategy to its limit, Lawrence intermittently recovers individuality and various forms of embodied identity after destabilizing the social and biological bases for their existence. He even seems, paradoxically, to render such notions all the more unassailable for having no firm origins or contours, effectively creating a bulwark against the aesthetic politics of Pater, Field, H.D., and Loy. Despite Lawrence’s exhortation to “be easy and impersonal” and his belief that we are but “a cell in the eye-tissue” of the “universe,” scholars have rarely linked his brand of individualism with modernist impersonality or with the physiological optics that impersonality draws out. Michael Bell, Michèle Hita, and, much earlier, F. R. Leavis have all pointed to Lawrence’s focus on the “noumenal elusiveness” of true feeling, often falsified in personal consciousness (Bell 144). But they also oppose this focus to the “impersonality that the techniques of modernism sought to achieve” (Bell 133). Similarly, Daniel Albright has argued that Lawrence displayed not so much a “search for impersonality” as a kind of retro-Romantic “expression of enormous personalness ” (9). For a long time, critics likewise distanced Lawrence’s aesthetic from modern science, directed not least by his own dismissive claim that science was “wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of complex . . . machine” and, more vehemently, that “scientists are liars.”1 Fernihough maintains, for example, that if there’s any core to Lawrence’s work, it’s his dislike of scientific method (156–57); and Eliseo Vivas (45) and Michael Black (90) both argue that Lawrence refused all scientific vocabulary and explanation as debilitating mental abstractions. Lawrence’s vitriol against modern science, however, didn’t actually purify his work of terms, analogies, and even methods that adapt science into aesthetic form. Recent scholarship has begun to grapple with this fact, focusing mainly on contradiction—the sense that Lawrence often disagreed on the surface with scientists and scientific philosophers only to commit to them at a more fundamental level (Craig Gordon; Granofsky). We might further nuance this analysis, though, D. H. Lawrence’s Impersonal Imperative 173 by recognizing that Lawrence’s disagreements were quite consistently with positivism and that he was...