D.H. Lawrence Meets Jacques Lacan

When I read the following summary of D.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective, I knew that the history of psychoanalysis and the trendiest type of literary criticism – environmental criticism (or ecocriticism) – would come in handy.

Stoltzfus examines the poetics of seven major fictions that Lawrence wrote between 1925 and 1930, five productive years that are referred to as his fabulation period. In each of the book’s seven chapters, in tandem with Lacan’s writings, Stoltzfus analyzes seven major characters, four of whom move from alienation to the renewal of self and the cosmos. He argues that Lawrence’s fiction is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive by showing us how to circumvent dysfunction. Stoltzfus brings literature and psychoanalysis together in readings that are both aesthetic and epistemological. They are recipes for curing the Anthropocene.

This is a lofty goal, encompassing both individual and universe.  It is not a new idea: in philosophy and religion – the two categories that encompassed the study of the human person before psychology became a distinct discipline in the 1870s – the human person has been seen since ancient times as a microcosm of the microcosm, an example of what goes on in the universe at a large scale.  In order to be well, from this point of view, the human person must be in harmony as an organic system, as a relational being, and in connection with the universe.  Psychology and the environment meet in the human person, shaping their behavior, thoughts, and instincts. 

Curing both, everywhere, all at once through theoretical discourse and fiction, however, seems – perhaps – somewhat unprecedented.

Stolzfus claims that Lawrence is no less than a self-proclaimed “healer,” “like the doctor in his fiction,” and so I tried to focus on what happen to be the highlights of the book: the parallels between Lawrence’s work and that of the mid-twentieth-century French Doctor of Psychology, Jacques Lacan.

Lacan is perhaps the first word in literary psychoanalytic theory.  The most basic concept for Lacan is the mirror phase: when children are able to examine themselves for the first time, whether in the mirror, when separated from their mother, or when they refer to themselves as, “I,” they perceive an image that is complete in itself and in the world about it.  From that point onwards, they try to live up to that image of a whole self in unhealthy ways, to regain the sense of completeness they had with their mother, that they see in the mirror, or use in language.  The goal of Lacanian psychology is to help people realize the falsity of appearances and mimetic desires in favor of what they really need in order to function.

The first two chapters of D.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions barely mention Lacan in favor of textual analysis – mostly repetition of the ideas of the introduction – and the third has a misleading titular focus on Ernest Hemingway that would better have been on its actual theme: bullfights as a symbol of masculinity. 

The absorbingly rigorous analysis sets in Chapter 4: “The Rocking-Horse Winner: Pleasing the Mother.” Stolzfus finds connections between Lawrence and Lacan that only a careful, well-read thinker of unique caliber and background could achieve.  Chapters 5 and 6 are shorter and hinge off of it.  Chapter 7 unwinds the Lawrence short story, “The Escaped Cock,” as a formula for “salvation,” and best encompasses Lawrence’s view of the human person.  The story “reads like a case study in psychoanalysis,” Stolzfus demonstrates, and “provides the answer to Lacan’s question: “What does the unconscious want for me?” The answer being that it wants me to live, and to live productively, and, as Derrida asserts, the desire to live overrides the death instinct that Freud formulated.”

In the story, Jesus Christ survives the cross and is left wandering, feeling betrayed by God the Father, reneging on his principles, and finally copulating with the priestess of Isis.  Stolzfus points out, “The union of the man with the priestess of Isis is, in Lacanian terms, a metaphor for moving the contents of the unconscious into consciousness.”

The priestess, as representative of the mother and nurturer of life, has activated the life principle and potential in the man.  For Lawrence, this is the most important step in self-actualization: the ability to leave behind our guilt-induced inclinations to self-sacrifice in order to fulfill the expectations of rigidly demanding societies.  Through giving the principle of life through the sexual act and fatherhood, the archetypal man has achieved fulfillment – one that I would argue echoes Nietsche’s arguments that Jesus was weak to die on the cross and should have embraced his will to power, while also being sensitive to Kierkegaard’s scorn of people who use Christianity like a club, simply a restraining social consciousness, instead of a way to engender kindness and generosity.

In his last major work, the nonfiction Apocalypse, Lawrence uses the idea that there are three stages of history behind us, and the fourth, a perfect age, to attain (in this volume, credited to Lawrence himself; the closest it gets to a theological awareness is in its usage of the general narrative form of Jesus’s death; no references to the Bible or current theological scholarship. He even credits the Lawrence scholar James Cowan as inventively naming the last three ages after the Trinity, rather than the originator of the entire idea, Joachim of Fiore). Stolzfus asserts, “If and when men and women achieve the fourth dimension, its wisdom will restore the blood-sense of the ancients.”

In this passage, we get a sense of what Lawrence termed “blood-consciousness,” a connection with all living things that surges to us from “beneath the earth’s surface” and aligns with pre-Christian belief systems.

Lawrence believed Etruscan culture to be the best of any, even among the ancient ones that he viewed as superior, which he adduces from artifacts and art. This is because of a “phallic consciousness” and “full-breastedness” manifested in tomb markings of symbolic phalluses and wombs.  In the first story Stolzfus examines, “Sun,” the heroine, Juliet, gains a secret, primitive “knowledge” from ancient Italy, a “vitality” and flexibility that save her from a loveless marriage, lead her to bathe in the penetrating rays of the sun (one of Lawrence’s sex-associated symbols), and has a sexual encounter with a Sicilian peasant that leads her to decide to move to Italy permanently.  As the tendency to idealize lost civilizations involves ahistorical and easily egoistic projections, Lawrence’s extrapolations and exhortations register as pseudo-scientific to me – especially in conjunction with “healing touch” as “sacrament” and “resurrection” (“The Escaped Cock” is a variation on this theme).  “[V]irginity as greed” is not a universal, apodeictic law, and prophets of erotic desire tend to lead sex cults in South America.

Lawrence scholars agree that this fully embodied literary style occurred abruptly in the last five years of his career, which is termed the “fabulation” period.  In it, Lawrence invested pollyanalytics – the study of symbols in literature after they are written, as opposed to preplanned ones – and in narrative forms that depended more on symbol than plot. Stolzfus argues that readers unconsciously will activate the inherent meaning in Lawrence’s worldview in their own minds through projective identification.

I have seen arguments such as this from Tolkien scholars and readers: that the Catholic world view is so predominant in The Lord of the Rings that readers cannot help but be influenced by it and, therefore, it must be a Catholic work.  Not only do I, like sundry other readers, resist the idea that we and the writing are controlled to the extreme that we now are ontologically identifying with and identified by the author – I also disagree that anyone’s knowing the Lacanian psychology and existential meaning of the work for the author could cure a statistically significant amount of people.

Ecocritical angles would lead me to ask: how can an individual not giving into societal expectations help society defeat pollution, isolation, and war?  Stolzfus’s premise is that cultural reform is needed in the twenty-first-century, and Lawrence was addressing the problem as it first was appearing one hundred years ago – but how?  Most of the indigenous cultures that Lawrence admired were in fact collectivist, as opposed to individualist, and the woman discussed in Chapter 2 was, though willingly, sacrificed by natives to the Sun God, her bloody body illuminated by a symbolically phallic ray, apparently restoring harmony between nature and humanity.  All of the stories take place in isolated environments – the vacationing wife sunbathing by herself in Italy, Jesus Christ with the priestess in some Edenic get-away spot, the kid stuck with his narcissistic mother in their house.  The stories end without showing how this affects any sort of communal problems, let alone those posed by globalization.

Stolzfus should have argued at the beginning of the book, as opposed to the end, that Lawrence is showing a precondition for a healthy society.  The inability of people to be happy due to lack of self-awareness, to communicate truly and respectfully in a world of cell-phone usage and political polarity, the denaturing of the earth and using of people as means to an end because of greed – simply destroying those results of our subliminal desires in favor of procreating and enjoying the physical universe is not the cure. Freud and Lacan both would have agreed with that – and likely Lawrence himself.

Stolzfus proposed to demonstrate how Lawrence assembled his fiction. He admirably did this through imaginative use of Lacanian metaphor, metonymy, and puns, as well as a deft command of Saussurian linguistics, Freud’s oeuvre, and the canons of existentialist and post-modern thought.

What he fails to show is how a “network of associations,” basically psychological symbols, can heal the Anthropocene.  Every society has failings, including those that Lawrence idealized, and I for one certainly would not want to imbibe a philosophy so unique to Lawrence into myself. 

Overall, Lawrence’s uncontentious injunction is for people “to live,” to connect with nature and other humans.  All the same, his frequent phallic symbols – to the point of “phallic icicles” that I cannot take seriously – keep me unconvinced of Stolzfus’s arguments that Lawrence’s early- and mid-career stories of female submission were replaced in his fabulation period with a more holistic view of complementariness between the sexes. Personally, I think that psychologist Karen Horney’s work on womb envy would be useful in drawing this out.

Like many academic monographs and articles, this volume takes its thesis too far, appending its moral and social responsibility in order to sound urgent.  Naïve and nonsensical sentences – “today the inter-human situation is omnipresent” – and repetition – rather like D.H. Lawrence’s own repetitious fictional symbolism that Eric Voegelin did not care for – disguises its actual merit: a dexterous, intricate knowledge of decades-worth of reading and scholarship.

D.H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective
By Ben Stolzfus
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023; 167 pp

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