D' H' Lawrence

1
D. H. Lawrence

• His Ideas of Sex and Blood Consciousness

2
Priest of Love

• His early writings 1. Autobiographical 2. With
  a sense of mission to address peoples deepest
  needs
• His Letters
• e. g. 1913, "I think, do you know, I have inside
  me a sort of answer to the want of today to the
  real, deep want of the English people" (Letters
  I 511).
• "I do write because I want folk - English folk -
  to alter, and have more sense" (Letters I 544).
  (source http//mss.library.nottingham.ac.uk/dhlbi
  og-chp4.html )

3
From Priest of Love to an Exile (2)

• Exiled after his elopement with Frieda, a German
  woman.
• Several factors
• his books being banned,
• Friedas German identity during the time of war
• his dissatisfaction with Western civilization.

4
Priest of Love

• My great religion is a belief in the blood, the
  flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can
  go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels
  and believes and says, is always true. The
  intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
• (source http//www.cyber-nation.com/victory/quota
  tions/authors/quotes_lawrence_dh.html )
• The blood also thinks, inside a man, darkly and
  ponderously. . .

5
His Critique of Western Civilization

• Industrialized ? too intellectual and
  dehumanized
• Promotes a new awareness of self and connection
  with Nature.
• ? 1. Balance between Blood and Mental
  consciousness
• 2. Primitive Man
• 3. Balance between man and woman by
  developing pure same-sex blood relationship.

6
Duality of human consciousness Mind vs. Blood

• The mind and the spiritual consciousness of man
  simply hates the dark potency of blood-acts
  hates the genuine dark sensual orgasms, which do,
  for the time being, actually obliterate the mind
  and the spiritual consciousness, plunge them in a
  suffocating flood of darkness.
• . . . Blood-consciousness overwhelms,
  obliterates, and annuls mind-consciousness.
  (Lawrence Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet
  Letter Studies in Classic American Literature )

7
Mind vs. Blood

• The brain is. . . the terminal instrument of the
  dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a
  certain flux into a certain fixed cypher. . .
  The mind is the instrument of instruments it is
  not a creative reality.
• Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 247
• For the blood is the substance of the soul, and
  of the deepest consciousness. It is by blood
  that we are and it is by the heart and liver
  that we live and move and have our being, are one
  and undivided. (Apropos 111)

8
Lawrences philosophy (2)

• modern We always want a conclusion, an
  end.
• Primitive having mythical and symbolic
  consciousness.
• To them a thought was a complete state of
  feeling awareness, a cumulative feeling, a
  deepening thing, in which feeling deepened into
  feeling in consciousness till there was a sense
  of fullness. (Apocalypse 80)

9
The Blind Man

• Maurices existence filled with blood
  consciousness. E.g. his appearance (406) his
  motion in his bedroom (407) his feeling the
  table ( 409) and smelling the bowl of violets
  (410).
• Bertie when there is no thought and no action,
  there is nothing. (411)
• Isabel blindness as deprivation, but something
  is there. (412)