wrestling match in chapter 20, the confrontation with Loerke in chapter 30. Throughout, men and women try to find some heterosexual harmony, which means balance-in-separation for Rupert and 'absolute surrender to love' for Ursula, even as the men turn repeatedly to one another to salve the pain of their enduring isolation and discontent.
There remains, to be sure, a large measure of subtly nuanced realism, both psychological and social. Lawrence's description of Thomas Crich's death, for example, rivals in its specificity of detail Tolstoy's psychological portrait in 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich.' And Lawrence still portrays the mining villages with particular attention to Nottinghamshire's industrialization, from the lockouts and the advent of automation to the political struggle and resentment. Even the bohemian community of English artists and intellectuals that Lawrence grew to hate is closely rendered. Middleton Murray, Katherine Mansfield, — 733- Bertrand Russell, Lady Ottoline Morrell, all make their appearances in what is after all a biting roman U+00EO clef. There are vestiges of conventional plot development, with several parallel episodes in a loose pattern built around Rupert's partial restoration through Ursula and Gerald's failure with Gudrun, culminating in Gerald's snowbound suicide. But the narrative drive is in sustained tension-not unlike the star-equilibrium of Rupert and Ursula-with the recurrent attempts to find 'the single radically-unchanged element' underlying it.
It is Gerald's desperate decision finally to lose his organic nature in industry that occupies the thematic and structural center of the book. 'It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of chaos.' The coal is produced more efficiently than ever, the miners have been reduced to passivity, and even Gerald is no longer needed; he has at last succeeded in making himself superfluous. In fact, following his penchant for grand dualisms, Lawrence outlines two racially determined paths to destruction, to superflousness. Gerald's way is an uneasy mix of English industry, Teutonic myth, Wagnerian opera, and Nietzschean philosophy. As deus ex machina, he is simultaneously the Wotan who must perish in a Götterdämmerung and a Nietzschean Übermensch, all conscious will to power and automated domination of nature-'the finest state of chaos.' Gerald embodies doomed, white European civilization, with no communal remedy in sight.
The alternative path to destruction-the «sun-destruction» and 'burning death-abstraction' of the Sahara-in fact points to the potential for rebirth outside Europe that will find fictional equivalents a few years later. When Rupert first sees the 'negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa' in Halliday's London apartment, he admires their intense sensuality; 'pure culture in sensation,' he tells an uncomprehending Gerald, 'really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual.' Rupert responds here to the 'hundred centuries of development' standing behind the statue-a primal, non-JudeoChristian era. But just as the vital race-consciousness of the MexicanIndian peasants in The Plumed Serpent has nearly died out and must be revived by Ramon's cult of Quetzalcoatl, so Rupert believes that ethnographically the statue also points to racial decline. 'It must have been thousands of years since her race died, mystically… the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and happiness must have lapsed.' What remains is the singular 'knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, — 734- knowledge such as the beetles have.' As in Lawrence's ideas about decadent forms of homosexuality, the Egyptian scarab he invokes implies excrement and death. The racial vitality that once lay behind the statues has been lost.
Rupert's third path, 'the way of freedom,' involves maintaining both a 'proud singleness' in marriage with Ursula and a failed effort to achieve a Blutbrüderschaft with Gerald. But these are in many ways displacements of the lost communal blood-consciousness, vaguely imagined in The Rainbow, that would be given substance in Lawrence's research on Mexico. Lawrence wrote in the foreword to Women in Love that 'the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters'; his work only grew more bitter in the years that followed. In almost all the novels that occur between Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent, the resentment that Lawrence had once tapped in the miners' villages of his youth is now turned in full force against the public. Sarcastic asides to the reader in, Aaron's Rod and The Lost Girl openly mock the assumed audience's conventional tastes; Mr. Noon spitefully forces the 'gentle reader' to swallow everything found offensive in earlier novels.
Yet the books of this period, especially The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod, also add to the scope of Lawrence's fiction. The former concerns Alvina Houghton's decision to run off with a traveling band of theatrical players and her subsequent romance with the laconic but passionate Italian actor, Ciccio. The novel is more significant, however, for what the actors-an inter-European male clan organized around a matriarchal leader-perform. Adapting scenes from Cooper's «Leatherstocking» tales, the Europeans play savage American Indians, the invented Natcha-Kee- Tawara, both onstage and off. The fraternal clan of the actors-'one tribe, one nation'-both functions as a version of archaic community and prefigures the cult of Quetzalcoatl in The Plumed Serpent.
Aaron's Rod is usually considered the first of Lawrence's novels about power and the need for strong authority, themes further developed in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. It is the story of miner's agent- cumflautist Aaron Sisson and his abandonment of marriage and family for music, sexual adventure, and political conflict. In Italy, he falls under the spell of Rawdon Lilly, a pseudophilosopher of the phoenixlike nature of identity and power. 'Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form,' Lilly says in the final chapter, called 'Words.' But that destiny may well require submission to a stronger man. 'We've -735- exhausted our love-urge, for the moment,' Lilly concludes, in a historical vision similar to Nietzsche's and Yeats's. 'We've got to accept the power motive, accept in a deep responsibility… The will to power-but not in Nietzsche's sense. Not intellectual power… But dark, living, fructifying power.' Power here is in essence another form of the natural will that Lawrence located in instinct and spontaneous desire, expressed in terms of a new political authoritarianism.
Like The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod points to the fully realized resurrection of organic community in The Plumed Serpent. Rawdon Lilly's ethnological speculations are of course those of Lawrence at this time, and their peculiarity is noteworthy.
There's a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they've exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can't do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and Red Indians… They had living pride… The American races-and the South Sea Islanders-the Marquesans, the Maori Blood. That was the true blood… All the rest are craven-Europeans, Asiatics, Africans… the mass-bullies, the individual Judases. (Chapter 9)
In contrasting Aaron to the wealthy, self-made Sir William Franks, Lawrence draws a distinction that also applies to the European and Aztec nations. 'The one [Sir William] held life to be a storing-up of produce and a conservation of energy: the other [Aaron] held life to be a sheer spending of energy and a storing up of nothing but experience.' As in Lawrence's contrasting views of Benjamin Franklin and rewriting, Aaron's belief in expenditure simultaneously counters the commercial utilitarianism of Europe while endorsing the «contestive» spending of energy that underlay Lawrence's view of organic community and of art. Lawrence may not have known the work of Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski on potlatch and gift exchange, but, Aaron's Rod elaborates an ethnology not very far from theirs.
At the conclusion of his wanderings, however, Lawrence revisits England in the setting of his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is first a recapitulation of the story of passionate men, repressed women, and sexual salvation that can be found throughout Lawrence's work. But it is at the same time the last shift in Lawrence's style, one more attempt to transform the oft-heard charge of vulgarity into a literary virtue. For Lawrence's vulgarity appears finally as a way of remaining in touch with -736- the vulgarity of his origins. It is deployed for precisely the reasons that Oliver Mellors uses his Midlands dialect in dealing with Constance Chatterley. Dialect is Mellors's chosen badge of honor, worn to indicate a proximity to earth, an identity that springs from organic community rather than mechanical society, and an ability to cross over-to trespass-the boundaries separating one class from another. Connie Chatterley's sister is convinced that Mellors is simply vulgar. But the keeper subtly mocks Hilda's priggishness in dialect she is too insensitive to appreciate. If Connie can learn to understand Mellors's tone correctly, the novel implies, readers can learn to understand Lawrence.
In effect, Lady Chatterley's Lover is only partially a hymn to erotic awakening and phallic consciousness; it is equally Lawrence's parable about modern literature. Clifford Chatterley, a true aristocrat, marries Constance Reid, of the 'well-to-do intelligentsia'; she is the daughter of a pre-Raphaelite, Fabian socialist mother and a Royal Academy artist father. After a brief and tepid honeymoon, Clifford ships off to war in 1917 and returns soon after 'more or less in bits,' paralyzed from the hips down and impotent. Clifford recovers with a special appreciation for being alive, 'but he had seen so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone.
