STRIFE, BALANCE, A WD ALLEGIANCE: '11,m SCHEMATA OF WILL IK FIVE NOVELS OF D. H. XAvJRENCK APPROVED: Ma j ox- P r of 0 3 s or / Minor P r of e r> s or f : IWJfv, lllreaSpr of c$e Department of English De?m of the Graduate School STRIFE, BALANCE, AND ALLEGIANCE: THE SCHEMATA OF WILL IN FIVE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Teresa Monahan Fiddes, B.A. Denton, Texas August, 1968 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. D. H. LAWRENCE: THE HERITAGE OF THE IRRATIONAL 1 II. THE NORDIC AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS: THE WILLS TO NULLITY 9 III. THE THEORY OF BALANCE: A GOOD TIGHT PUNT . 1*1 IV. CONTACT OF THE LEADER: PERSONAL AND COSMIC. 70 BIBLIOGRAPHY 92 iii CHAPTER I D. H. LAWRENCE: THE HERITAGE OF THE IRRATIONAL 125 "The mysteries practiced among men are unholy mysteries." 126 "And they pray to these images, as if one "were to talk •with a man's house, knowing not what gods or heroes are." Heraclitus D. H. Lawrence made the final break through the mask of Victorian prudery to gain a full conception of man and his role in the universe. His principal emphasis is on the restoration of man's conception of himsel£---a^.jinimal, an animal capable of conceptualizing, but essentially animal all the same. In attempting to restore man to the mindless state of irrational animism, Lawrence did away with the con- ventional idea of man as the perfection of God's created universe. Lawrence did not conceive of man as being controller of the natural universe; he thought of man as being, like Mellors in Lady Chatterlv's Lover. a warden who lives within natural order. He attacks vain intellectual sophistry of the scientific, industrial society and finds man to be a brute spirit caged by the conventions of his puny reason and his self-imposed social customs. Philosophically, he changes the emphasis from being to becoming. But Lawrence is not original in his argument. The Hundred Years' War against an over-intellectualized -world was begun by Schopenhauer, carried on by Nietzsche, and passed on to Freud; Lawrence's petard is the last resounding ex- plosion. Within Lawrence's cry of "blood consciousness" and "mindlessness" resound the echoes of Schopenhauer's dark will, Nietzsche's concept of personal power, and Freud's libido. Lawrence's is the most powerful vindication of the irrational present in the twentieth century. Whereas Freud speaks to science, Lawrence speaks to man himself. Lawrence came into contact with Nietzsche and Schopen- hauer shortly after adolescence. Jessie Chambers, in her book about herself and Lawrence, records some of the reading with which she and Lawrence became acquainted. They read widely together in philosophy, and discovered the ideas of T. H. Huxley, Haeckel, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.'' In one of the first manuscripts of Sons and Lovers (Paul Morel B'), Lawrence states with autobiographic precision that Paul and Miriam read Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche at the ages of sixteen and seventeen.^ Because of "E.T.s" objection to the passage, it was deleted in the printed text.3 1 Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (New York, 1957), p. 15^~ %arry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence. (New York, 1951 ), p. 379. ~ ~ %-Iarry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1962), p. 72. Lawrence's ideas on Being and Becoming were also influenced by his readings in the Greeks. After he left college life, he read Plato, "... and still more, the earlier men like Heraklitos and Anaximander, in whose notions of flow, of balance, and of the elements it is evident that he found much comfort."1* Lawrence is not exactly like any one of the above philosophers; he never directly imitated the thought of authors he had read. Instead, he let their ideas take root and grow in the creative centers of his own mind, so that when he expresses a concept of an irrational will in his own writings, it is in his unique language, tempered by his ex- perience, and further reading and vitslized for his own age. He never gave up anything. He assumed a critical ambivalence of acceptance-rejection in all his reactions to the intellectual world around him.' ... It is a mistake therefore to say that Lawrence ^ was influenced by Freud or Bergson or Nietzsche; . ? So, although Lawrence is a direct successor to the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he never uses the precise terms of their expression. They are all different in the specific applications of their ideas to the society of which they were a part; but the essential ideas are very close. Lawrence is like each of the three philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heraclitus, but he alters, changes, and reinterprets both 11 William York Tindall, H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York, 1939), p. 19* ^Hoffman, Freudianism. p. 1 52. >4 language and idea to fit the scheme of life which he perceives at different moments in his own existence. The greatest similarity between Lawrence, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche is that the basis of each man's philosophy is a concept of irrational will, a life force which motivates all action, all becoming. For Schopenhauer, will is the pulse of life, the mystery of existence, the groundless, unjustifiable primum mobile of the reactions of cause and effect.^ All the world is will made manifest; it is never conscious until it reaches its objectification in the intellect of man. But that intellect does not have the capability to know the life 'force, or to explain it, because the will is groundless. It does not exist per se in time, space, or causality, the three constituent elements of science, mathe- matics, hence knowledge.7 The body is the will objectified therefore, the mind, as part of the body itself, is an extension of the irrational. Life, thereby, has no basis except to be, and to become, and to change. Lawrence comes closest to this doctrine in Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious in explaining the generation of new iife through the con- ception of a child. He defies scientific analysis of con- ception being the child's partaking of his parents' respective 6 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, edited by Irwin Edman (New York, 1955"), p -7 lb id ., pp. 86-87. ^Ibid., p. 71. natures. Something new, different, and inexplicable is •within the child which has nothing to do with its creatorr The nature of the infant is not just a permutation- and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something which is, and which will forever remain, causeless.9 It is this" sacred unknown which is the basis for all indi- viduality. And for Lawrence, as well as for Nietzsche, the individual is all-important. Nietzsche echoes the theory of the irrational life force in his concept of the will to power, Essentially, the will to power is present in the will to know oneself apart from the traditional ideational concepts of society; he must discover his individuality, the mystery . of his existence. No one can build thee the bridge, over which thou must cross over the river of life, save thyself alone. There are paths and bridges and demigods without number, that will gladly carry thee over, but only at the price of thine own self; thy self woulqist thou have to give in pawn, and then lose it.'u "The free man is immoral because it is- his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition." With Nietzsche, will becomes a conscious operation of self-discovery; but again, he provides no explanation for its being. The force resides in a universal compulsion to become. "9D. E. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unc onscious (New" Y or ks 1 967), p. 1 1 Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche,, edited by Geoffrey Clive (New York, 1965), p. 329. The great distinction between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is contained in their respective views of the will as it controls man's actions. For Schopenhauer, it is deterministic The will stimulates man's desire for a goal in order to force him to be in motion in a chaotic world of senseless, endless cause and effect. The goal is never gained, because ideals exist only as propellents of man's ambition. The acrid taste of disappointment and gradual decay is the most common of every man's experience. "Life is the constant self assertion of this will; a long desire which is never fulfilled; dis- illusion following attainment."'''' Desire, passion become suffering. Man is the tool of the will in the pursuit of his desires, in his blind striving. Life is a struggle with- out meaning. Nietzsche, however, is much more optimistic. .Man is not driven; rather, the perceiving man drives himself. "Nietzsche regards the complex structure of human desire as evidence not of the will to live but of the will to power. Passions are a force for the assertion of individual im- portance. ^ The difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is that between voluntaristic pessimism and volun- taristic optimism.^3 T. Bailey Saunders, "Translator's Preface," The Pessimist's Handbook.by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Helen E. Barnes (Lincoln, Nebraska), p.