sun-rays & snow-abstracts

One cannot help but notice that our classroom discussions have shied away from, or at best, skirted around the subject of race. Yet our text contains several passages in which Lawrence probes some undeniably problematic, but potentially illuminating concepts of black/white racialism. Lawrence filters these examinations (interestinlgy) through male perspectives (i.e. Gerald and Birkin) via free and indirect discourse, so it may prove difficult to disentangle Lawrence's perspective from those of his characters. In any case, I'd like to initiate the dialogue by narrowing the focus on Moony, pgs. 253-254 (and please keep in mind that I'm attempting here to analyze from the perspective of the work in itself. It is not at all my intention to offend anyone; I cannot speak for Lawrence in this regard).

The passage in question arises out of Birkin's craving for the sensual mystery beyond that of the European “phallic knowledge,” through to a mystery he assigns to the “inverted” culture of West Africa. “Inverted” would seem imply, in this context, the yawnic as opposed to the phallic, and thus, Birkin (/maybe Lawrence) already equates racial with gendered characteristics.

Now we approach the crucial section of this passage: “There remained this way, this awful African process, to be fulfilled...” The words “process” and “fulfilled” feel important; “process” evokes a series of stages in a progression, either natural or mechanical, while “fulfilled” carries with it all the connotations of wholeness and fixity that we've so exhaustively discussed. The text goes on: “...It would be done differently by the white races. The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfill a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction. The putrescent mystery of sun-rays.” The first tension I notice in these sentences is that the white mystery “will be,” and thus has yet to be fulfilled, while the West-African (so black, presumably) has “been fulfilled” already. Still further, both mysteries are described as abstractions, and both approach a self-destruction, which negation we might interpret as mindlessness, or the dead-letter ego. The connotations of “controlled” are also relevant to our discussions in that area. But the ice/sun dichotomy strikes me as particularly intriguing. It seems to me the text implies that black Africans experience sunlight (keep in mind the text often associates light with knowledge) directly, while white Europeans experience sunlight as it appears reflected from the ice and snow. This reflectedness of abstraction puts me in mind of mirrors, and consequently, of self-consciousness--which seems usually to carry with it some negative baggage in this text. So contrary to first appearance, perhaps, the text presents racialism with characteristic ambivalence, and by extension, equivalence; the clash between races--as between light and darkness, male/female, hetero/homoerotic--allows for movement, for the expression of some inclusive “truth” about the “man as alive.”