D.H. Lawrence's "Dark Page": narrative primitivism in 'Women in Love' and 'The Plumed Serpent.' - English author

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Brett Neilson

George Stocking claims that while Tylor argued that "the present condition of savages was the product of a complex history," it was only with the "cultural anthropology" of Franz Boas that the evolutionist ideal of a universal system of cultural development was abandoned for a relativistic method that examined cultural differences before asking "what is common to all culture" (77, 212). Birkin's insistence that the carving displays "an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort" (emphasis mine) may share something of this relativism, but it does not deactivate his aesthetic universalism. Like the nineteenth-century ethnologists who influenced Boas's thought (Bastian, Lazarus, Steinthal), his approach to the primitive is "conditioned by the cosmographer's perception of wholes" (Stocking 213). Later in the novel, when Birkin remembers another African fetish displayed in Halliday's apartment, these aspects of Lawrence's primitivism receive a different inflection.

She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. (253)

Birkin finds this fetish to embody a purely "sensual knowledge" that provides evidence a slide into "mindless" sexuality that occurred long ago among the Africans who carved it. As Torgovnick observes, this is a "degenerate" and femininized version of the primitive (161-63), supporting a model of cultural diffusion by which traditional societies are the offshoots of a higher civilization. Thus Birkin imagines not that primitive cultures failed to develop a "desire for creation and productive happiness" but that this aspiration "lapsed" at a point in time. This emphasis on "disintegration" seems to counteract the earlier passage's claims for cultural "development." Yet, as Lawrence's invocation of a "mindless, progressive knowledge" suggests, the idea of progress is implicit in that of degeneration, since the former is the latter in reverse. The complicity of these (opposing) ways of thinking about the primitive is evident in contemporary ethnographic works, like those of Tylor, which simultaneously formulate and apply the anthropological theories of evolutionism and diffusionism. Johannes Fabian remarks the shared consequences of these hypotheses by arguing that the diffusionist understanding of "culture history" disregards "the evolutionist concern with temporal sequence in favor of a model of spatial distribution" (18-19). For Levi-Strauss, neither approach is suitable for studying "living societies" since their "spatial and temporal coordinates are the result of the way the elements were chosen and assembled, instead of being the reflection of a true unity in the object" (5). Birkin's thoughts cannot be interpreted as a direct commentary on these issues (progress is not necessarily equivalent to evolution), but they also suggest a means of constructing oneness in their object.