Showing posts with label pan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pan. Show all posts

15 Feb 2021

Pan and Jesus in the Art of Dorothy Brett

Fig 1. Dorothy Brett: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (1963)
Fig. 2. Dorothy Brett: Pan and Christ (date unknown)
 

I would like, if I may, to develop a point added as a note to a recent post discussing an essay by Catherine Brown [1] which mentions a painting by the Anglo-American artist Dorothy Brett entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ (fig. 1); a work which nicely illustrates Lawrence's dual nature whilst, crucially, making no attempt to reconcile his twin selves.
 
As suggested in the note, the work maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's very lovely picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost) [2]
 
As I also say in the note, if only she'd been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called the painting Pan versus the Crucified. But I'm now doubtful she would understand what is meant by this, or why such a twist on the German thinker's original formula provides as useful a key for unlocking Lawrence's philosophical project as Dionysus versus the Crucified does for Nietzsche's own [3]
 
For if we are to judge by another painting she produced of Pan and Christ (fig. 2) - in which there is clearly a reconciliation between them (to the extent that they are shown holding hands) - then Brett seems not to grasp the crucial fact that the two gods each have their own flowers, as Brown nicely puts it, and by which she acknowledges that Pan and Christ are antagonists forever separated by a pathos of distance    

The fact is you can't have horns on your head and wear a crown of thorns - despite the desire of many New Age hippies to create a kind of syncretic religious mishmash. As Lawrence shows in The Escaped Cock, in order for the man who died to resurrect into pagan vitality he has to renounce his mission and his Christhood and accept that the earth doesn't need salvation, it needs tillage and that mankind is better off being watched over by an all-tolerant Pan than a judgemental Jehovah.   
 
Like Elsa in 'The Overtone', you can certainly experience both Jesus and Pan, but not at one and the same time, or in the same way; the former belongs always to the pale light and the latter to the darkness: "'And night shall never be day, and day shall never be night.'" [4]     
 
To imagine them hand-in-hand, as Brett does, is a form of nihilism in that it annihilates the nature of each. As Lawrence notes of another two forces forever divided and at odds - the lion and the unicorn - each exists only by virtue of their inter-opposition: "Remove the opposition and there is a collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal nothingness." [5] 
 
It is the fight of opposites which is holy and there is no reconciliation save in this negation which, for Lawrence, is the unforgivable sin. And Brett has either forgotten this idea, chosen to ignore it, or perhaps never really understood the huge importance it has for Lawrence ... 
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The post in question - Iconography is Never Innocent - can be read by clicking here. See note 4.

[2] In a post on his blog - Larval Subjects - Levi R. Bryant uses non-technical terms to help readers understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean: "Consider the relationship between me and my cat. My cat and I share entirely different worlds even though we inhabit one and the same earth or heteroverse. There is no point where our worlds converge, yet nonetheless certain differential events flash across our distinct and divergent worlds, creating a relation in this non-relation. Somehow our worlds come to be imbricated and entangled with one another, even though they don’t converge on any sort of sameness." To read Bryant's post in full, click here.   
 
[3] See Nietzsche, 'Why I Am a Destiny', in Ecce Homo, where this line appears; or see section 1052 in Book IV of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche explains the distinction between Dionysus and the Crucified as he understands it.   
 
[4] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Overtone', in St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-17. The line quoted is on p. 16.

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 256. 


11 Feb 2021

Iconography is Never Innocent

Dorothy Brett (1883-1977): 
Portratit of D. H. Lawrence with Halo (1925)
Oil on canvas (78 x 48 cm)
 
'The narrowed, slightly stylised eyes ... gaze with pain ... at the state of the world and at his own fate. 
His halo is formed by a moon in near-total eclipse; soon he will be left in darkness, 
save for the star that burns ...'   
 
 
I. 
 
The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 
 
Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those authors and those essays most likely to give pleasure ... Authors such as Catherine Brown, for example, and her essay: 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon' [1] ...
 
 
II.
 
As the title of the essay indicates, Brown is interested in the manner in which the English poet, novelist, and painter, Mr D. H. Lawrence, has been subordinated to an image [2].   
 
This public image was partly of Lawrence's own making and partly due to the (loving) characterisations and (sometimes spiteful) caricatures produced by friends, followers, critics, and opponents [3]; some of whom portray him as a visionary Christ-like figure, some of whom depict him as a smiling Pan-like figure with devilish horns and hooves, and some of whom - like the Hon. Dorothy Brett - can't quite decide or imagine Lawrence as a combination of both; part-saint, part-satyr [4].
 
Either way, this iconisation of Lawrence as Christ or Pan is not only a bit lame, but, as Brown points out, all too bleeding obvious, as numerous Lawrentian features - not least of all the beard - "suggested contemporary understandings of each or both gods" [5] to many of his circle and, indeed, many of his most ardent (but unimaginative) readers even today. 
 
Brown spends some considerable time discussing Lawrence as Christ and Lawrence as Pan with reference to some of the more famous photographs of Lawrence and I pretty much agree with her analysis; except for her remarks on the 1915 studio portrait of Lawrence in a hat - an image used in 2017 for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference [click here] - which I don't think should be read in religious terms at all. 
 
The image - certainly as featured on the Conference poster - is more punk than Pan and invites viewers to consider Lawrence as a figure within popular culture, rather than Romantic paganism or Ancient Greek mythology. I think you really have to stretch things to insist on Pan as a revolutionary (and/or déclassé) outsider, as Brown does (not once, but twice) - just as you have to subscribe to a false etymology to think that the god Pan lends his name to pantheism [6].          
 
Moving on, we come to the subject of iconoclasm ... As Brown notes: 
 
"One consequence of Lawrence's deification has been that many of the attacks on him have addressed deified versions of him. [...] Such attacks tend to fall into two categories - those which accuse him of resembling Christ or Pan, and those which accuse him of failing to resemble them, thus respectively condemning him by negative association with, and critiquing his alleged pretensions in relation to, these gods." [7]

I have to say, this seems fair enough: those who live by the image, die by the image - and Lawrence lived by the image at least as much as other modernist writers. He may have satirised the desire for literary fame and personal recognition, but, as Brown points out, he certainly contributed to his own celebrity (or notoriety) and was acutely conscious of his public persona. 
 
Thus, whilst most would struggle to remember what James Joyce or Ezra Pound looked like, there are probably still quite a few people who would recognise red-bearded D. H. Lawrence (if only as drawn by Hunt Emerson, comic book style [8]), even though his popularity and iconic status has been waning for the past forty or fifty years.      
 
 
III. 

In conclusion ... Whilst Catherine ends on a relatively upbeat note, calling for "passionate and joyful admiration" of Lawrence, rather than "misdirected deification, or irrelevant iconoclasm" [9], I think I'd like to emphasise the following: Iconography is never innocent ...
 
That is to say, it plays a complicit role in what Baudrillard terms the perfect crime and by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs [10]
 
When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is made visible and the image no longer reflects, masks, or perverts a basic reality, but bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (i.e., it becomes a simulacrum).
 
Whilst I don't subscribe to aniconism, I do think that all image making is ideally and idealistically reductive and that we - Lawrence scholars included - need to theorise the play and proliferation of images carefully and critically. For it's arguable that philosophical questions of representation and reality, truth and appearance, have never been as crucial as today in an age of social media and deepfake software; a world in which everyone comes to presence on a myriad screens (close-up, in high-definition, and full transparency).     
 
 
Notes 
 
[1] A pre-edited version of this essay can be read on Catherine Brown's website: click here
 
[2] As readers will doubtless know, the word icon, from the Ancient Greek εἰκών, simply means image or likeness. As Catherine Brown reminds us, however: "'Icon' expanded its meaning from a visual depiction (especially of a divinity) to 'A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol' or one 'considered worthy of admiration or respect' in the early 1950s (OED draft addition 2001)." See 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),p. 428. 
 
[3] For details of how Lawrence has been seen by other artists, see the fascinating essay by Lee M. Jenkins, 'Lawrence in Biofiction', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 385-397. 
 
[4] To be fair, Brett produced a very lovely work which reveals Lawrence's dual nature. Entitled Portrait of D. H. Lawrence as Pan and Christ, the picture (produced in 1926 and re-painted in 1963 after she destroyed the original canvas due to the mockery and unfair criticism it received), crucially doesn't try to reconcile the twin selves. Rather, it maintains what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a relation of non-relation. In other words, Brett's picture illustrates a disjunctive synthesis between divergent forces that somehow manage to communicate by virtue of a difference that passes between them like a spark (or what Lawrence would probably term the Holy Ghost). If she'd only been thinking with her Nietzsche head on Brett might have called it Pan versus the Crucified
      Whilst Catherine Brown doesn't use the above philosophical terminology, she clearly understands that Pan and Christ are (as she says) mutually antagonistic, despite certain similarities between them, and that "each god has his own, separate validity; each has his own flowers", although she clearly longs for a more balanced (less hostile) relationship between the two. See her essay 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, pp. 427 and 428. Brett's painting is reproduced in this book as Plate 36, on p. 302.      
 
[5] Catherine Brown, ibid., p. 427.  

[6] It's a mistaken piece of folk etymology to equate Pan's name (Πάν) with the Greek word for 'all' (πᾶν). The former is probably contracted from the earlier term Παων, which is in turn derived from a root word meaning to guard (it wil be recalled that Pan is a pastoral deity who looks over shepherds). Lawrence cheerfully exploits this false etymology; thus his talk of the Pan mystery and being "within the allness of Pan". See 'Pan in America', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 158. The line is quoted by Catherine Brown in 'D. H. Lawrence: Icon', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, on p. 434.   

[7] Catherine Brown, ibid.

[8] See 'D. H. Lawrence - Zombie Hunter', by Hunt Emerson and Kevin Jackson, in Dawn of the Unread (Issue #7, 2016): click here. Or see Plate 38 in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, p. 304.  

[9] Catherine Brown, op. cit., p. 439.
 
[10] See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 1996). 
 
 
For a follow up post to this on the figures of Pan and and Christ in the art of Dorothy Brett, click here.


15 May 2017

Pan Comes to Hampstead: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence's 'The Last Laugh'

Pan - by Thalia Took on deviantart.com


Written in 1924, 'The Last Laugh' imagines an appearance of the goat-footed Greek god Pan in Hampstead on a snowy winter's night and the tragic consequences of this. I'm not quite sure what genre it belongs to, but we might best describe it as an example of sardonic paganism; a mocking and malevolent form of queer gothic fiction directed towards a dark god who is always coming, but who never quite arrives or reveals himself.

By setting the story in a leafy north London suburb, Lawrence relates his onto-theological vision to everyday experience, whilst, at the same time, demonstrating how the latter unfolds within a wider, inhuman context that is resistant to any kind of moral-rational codification. He thereby attempts to loosen the aura of necessity surrounding categories of the present and restore a little primordial wonder to NW3.

How successful he is in achieving this, I'll leave for readers to decide; the following is essentially just a summary of the nightmarish and at times surreal tale for those who are unfamiliar with it, rather than a detailed critical analysis (although there is some degree of commentary) ...

Never one to pass up the chance to exploit cliché - if, as here, for comic rather than dramatic effect - Lawrence opens his tale at midnight, the church clock having just struck the magical hour when, for a short period, there's an opening between our electrically-luminous civilization and the world that lies outside the gate; that unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge where things go bump in the night.  

Three figures emerge from a handsome Georgian house: "A girl in a dark blue coat and fur turban, very erect: a fellow with a little dispatch-case, slouching: a thin man with a red beard, bareheaded, peering out of the gateway down the hill that swung in a curve downwards towards London."

The light covering of snow on the ground has created the impression of a new world; but it takes more than a few flakes to really change things, as we'll discover. The man with the beard, Lorenzo, says goodnight to the couple and goes back inside. Now the slouching man in a bowler hat, Mr. Marchbanks, and the erect, sharp girl who was somewhat deaf, Miss James, were all alone in the street; "save for the policeman at the corner."

She looks at her companion: with his "thick black brows sardonically arched, and his rather hooked nose" he seemed to her "like a satanic young priest" - or a "sort of faun on the Cross, with all the malice of the complication". As they walk together, past the trees and the loneliness of the Heath, toward the local Tube station, he hears somebody laughing. Turning on her Marconi made listening machine, Miss James lifts her "deaf nymph's face", but hears nothing until, that is, he suddenly "gave the weirdest, slightly neighing laugh, uncovering his strong, spaced teeth, and arching his black brows, and watching her with queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes".

Marchbanks is - seemingly without his knowing it - possessed by the Pan-spirit. Looking at the girl in an almost diabolical manner, his face gleaming and "wreathed with a startling, peculiar smile", he again gave "the most extraordinary laugh ... like an animal laughing".

This attracts the attention of the tall, clean-shaven young policeman who comes over to see what's occurring. The Pan-possessed man glared at the bobby and asked if he could hear the laughter that came out of him but didn't belong to him. At the sound of this diabolical laughter, "something roused in the blood of the girl and of the policeman" and they edged closer to one another, their bodies touching:

"Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her ... And she could feel the presence of the young policeman, through all the thickness of his dark-blue uniform, as something young and alert and bright."

Was that his truncheon, or was he equally happy to be pressing up against her ...?

The religious mania spreads: Miss James thinks she can see someone hiding among the holly bushes. This makes the Pan-possessed man in the bowler hat get even more excited and, "with curious delight", he broke into laughter again, stamping his feet on the snow covered ground, dancing, before running off like a madman.

When he finally comes to a halt, Marchbanks finds himself at the house of a beautiful Jewish woman whom Lawrence encourages us to believe is a prostitute. She has dark hair and large dark eyes. She is standing in her open doorway, believing that somebody knocked (as a working girl, she is, of course, always anticipating a knock at her door).

Asked if it was he who knocked, Marchbanks says no. But then he admits that perhaps it was him after all - but without his knowing it. He asks her if can come in and she agrees. So he enters the house, trailing after the woman "like a hound" that follows a bitch on heat, tail wagging and tongue lolling.

Meanwhile, Miss James and the policeman had arrived on the scene, just in time to see the man in the bowler hat enter the house with the woman in high heels. The girl decides there's no point waiting about and so sets off back down the hill, burning with thoughts of murder and strange superhuman power:

"Her feet felt lighter, her legs felt long and strong. She glanced over her shoulder again. The young policeman was following her, and she laughed to herself. Her limbs felt so lithe and so strong, if she wished she could easily run faster than he. If she wished she could easily kill him, even with her hands.
      So it seemed to her. But why kill him? He was a decent young fellow. She had in front of her eyes the dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes. Her breast felt full of power, and her legs felt long and strong and wild. She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame."

It's precisely this kind of writing that Lawrence's critics object to, finding it fatuous and bombastic; a dubious mix of lurid sexual fantasy and sulphurous theology. But for those of us who love him, it's his idiosyncratic narrative style which most appeals. Of course it risks becoming ludicrous, or sometimes losing its way in a semantic fog; for it's not easy to articulate unconscious thoughts and feelings, or describe those things which lie outside conventional language. But that's why speculative and experimental writers and thinkers, like Lawrence, who attempt this should, I think, be praised for their courage.

Anyway, let us return to the story ...

It begins to snow heavily and, despite her deafness, Miss James hears voices all around her. She knows that he's come back, although the god who has returned remains nameless in the tale. The snowstorm intensifies; there are flashes of lightning and she laughs at the young policeman whose state of nervous panic made him look "like a frightened dog that sees something uncanny".

They come to a church with its doors flung wide open, allowing the wind and the voices to enter and whirl about, howling and calling. Now, for the first time, she too hears the "strange, naked sound" of laughter. The policeman was silent and fearful. He stood cowed, "with his tail between his legs, listening to the strange noises in the church".

The demonic forces that have been set loose wreck the interior of the church and amidst all the chaos of snow, wind, and laughter, there is the gay sound of pipes playing and the marvellous scent of almond blossom, like that of a Mediterranean spring.

Finally, the girl and the policeman arrive at her house. He is frightened and cold, so asks if he may come in and warm himself. She agrees, telling him he may make up a fire in the sitting-room, but to kindly not disturb her in her bedroom.

Upon waking the next morning, Miss James, an artist, inspects her own paintings and laughs at their absurd, almost grotesque character. Miraculously, she can now hear the birds singing without the need of her mechanical hearing-device. But the poor policeman, however, is distraught, having become mysteriously lame overnight. Not that the girl seems overly concerned with his condition, preferring to sit down before her window, in the sun, and to reflect on the fact that the world had now been genuinely transformed:

"Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven."

She also reflects, as Lawrentian heroines are wont to do, on love and sex and decides that she doesn't want either. For modern men, she decides - at least those of her acquaintance - are all a bit doggy and infra dig; either messing around with prostitutes, like Marchbanks, or incapable of acting with any real courage and authority - despite wearing a policeman's uniform - when confronted by life (and proud womanhood) in all its savage splendour.

She vaguely wishes that the laughing god had ravished her as he had ravaged the church, so that she might have emerged "new and tender out of the old, hard skin". But at least she had her hearing restored, so she couldn't complain.

At this point, Marchbanks arrives, as it was his habit "to come and take breakfast with her each morning." He asks her about the young policeman and she interrogates him about the Jewish-looking woman. They are friends, not lovers, she and he, but clearly intimate and concerned with one another's affairs.

When they eventually, decide to check on the young policeman downstairs they find him understandably upset because of his sudden lameness. Slowly pulling off his sock, he reveals "his white left foot curiously clubbed, like the weird paw of some animal". Looking at it makes him cry: "And as he sobbed, the girl heard again the low, exulting laughter."

As if the situation weren't already disturbing enough, Marchbanks now lets out a strange, yelping cry, like a wounded animal: "His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly [the] wild recognition ... of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself."

And then, "with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor", before lying completely still "in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening." Miss James stares at the body in a somewhat nonplussed manner and enquires of the policeman if her friend Mr. Marchbanks is dead. The officer, however, was trembling with such terror and his teeth chattering so violently, that it took him some moments to finally stammer that it certainly looked that way.

A faint smell of almond blossom once more filled the air - sweeter, certainly, than the foul stench of sulphur, but just as infernal in nature it seems ...


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Last Laugh', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 

Note: thanks to the University of Adelaide, the story can also be read online: click here.

This post is dedicated to Catherine Brown: may she always have the last laugh ...


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12 Jul 2016

On Masturbation and the Invocation of Pan



According to archetypal psychologist James Hillman, masturbation is a universal practice which is legitimate as a form of sexual behaviour in its own right and not to be considered a poor substitute for coition. What's more, masturbation is not for Hillman merely a simple pleasure; it exemplifies rather the important relationship between mythology and pathology and is divinely sanctioned by the great god Pan whom it invokes and enacts within the flesh.

It would, of course, be easy to laugh at this line of thinking - a line that I know all too well and followed all too closely in my youth - but where I think Hillman is to be commended is in his insistence that masturbation is not an eruptive sexual urge and that the association with Pan is therefore not merely a means of dressing up the old idea of the uncontrollable beast in man.  

Despite the language used, Hillman's analysis is sophisticated enough to allow for the fact that both the will to masturbation and the will to inhibition which accompanies and diverts it, belong to the same instinctual matrix; i.e. that the latter is not merely socially constructed in order to frustrate a more primal desire.

Just as moralists mistakenly branded masturbation an evil because it seemed to serve no biological or social purpose, so too have sex radicals confused the shame which accompanies masturbation with an internalised authority in need of overthrowing. Hillman recognises the traditional moral standpoint to be misguided, but so too does he interrogate the attempt to liberate masturbation from the restraining prohibition which is such a crucial element of the compulsion itself. For Hillman, sex radicalism and secular humanism ultimately risk making masturbation meaningless:

"Deprived of its fantasy, shame and conflict, masturbation becomes nothing but physiology, an inborn release mechanism without significance for the soul".

In other words, in seeking to make masturbation a harmless activity, we reduce the mystery of Pan - and for Hillman this is a bad thing. For Hillman wishes to re-enchant the world via a "re-education of the citizen in relation to nature". However, he's keen to stress that this re-education "goes deeper than the nymph consciousness of awe and gentleness" and that a Romantic love of the countryside is not enough:

"The re-education of the citizen would have to begin at least partly from Pan’s point of view … But Pan’s world includes masturbation, rape, panic, convulsions, and nightmares. The re-education of the citizen in relation to nature means nothing less than a new relationship with these ‘horrors’, ‘moral depravities’, and ‘madnesses’ which are part of the instinctual life …"

Rightly or wrongly, Hillman insists that by intensifying interiority with a complex mix of joy and shame, masturbation “brings genital pleasure, fantasy, and conflict to the individual as psychic subject" and ultimately opens the way towards a neo-pagan future ...    


See: James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare, (Continuum, 2000).

Note: this post is a revised and edited extract from an essay on masturbation in The Treadwell's Papers 1: Sex/Magic (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). Readers interested in two related posts, also extracted from the above essay, should click here and here.