Lawrence and the creative process

Style, Summer, 2003 by Jack Stewart

Philosophers like Levin, Macmurray, Polanyi, and Fiumura try to bridge the gap between thinking and experience, but none does so as radically as Lawrence, who writes in his essay "On Being a Man": "Real thought is an experience. It begins as a change in the blood, a slow convulsion and revolution in the body itself. It ends as a new piece of awareness, a new reality in mental consciousness" (616). This process in writing is the phenomenology of style: Lawrence, in his essays, is a phenomenologist as well as a poet and provocateur. (15) Mind and senses converge in his style, surcharging the reader's response. Although he is the prophet of "[an] unspeakable communication in touch [...] that can never be transmuted into mind content" (Women in Love 320), in "On Being a Man" he characterizes creative thought as precisely the transmutation of bodily awareness into an integrated "mental consciousness" that seeks and finds expression in language and style.

"Art-Speech" and Personal Style

"Art-speech," of literary style, with its dialogic animation and subtextual symbolism, is a more flexible means of communication than philosophy. It shares some of the supple openness that preserves the movement of living consciousness in Etruscan art, where "the wonderfully suggestive edge of the figures" forms a "flowing contour where the body suddenly leaves off, upon the atmosphere" (Sketches 123). Taken as a metaphor of literary style, this art imagery suggests the supplement of feeling and creative energy that accompanies vital expression, linking conscious and unconscious in a fluctuating figure-ground unity. Lawrence's understanding of the creative process fuses religion, art, and being in a single creative monad. In "The Spirit of Place," he outlines his phenomenology of literary language:

   [A]rt-speech, art-utterance is [...l the greatest universal language
   of mankind, greater than any esoteric symbolism. Art-speech is also
   a language of pure symbols. But whereas the authorized symbol stands
   always for a thought or an idea [...] the art-symbol or art-term
   stands for a pure experience, emotional and passional, spiritual and
   perceptual, all at once[...]. Art communicates a state of being
   [...]. Art-speech is a use of symbols which are pulsations on the
   blood and seizures upon the nerves, and at the same time pure
   percepts of the mind and pure terms of spiritual aspiration. (18-19;
   my italics)

As Lawrence sees it, mind and senses fuse in the creative process. His own practice, like his theory, leaves space for the unconscious, giving articulated figures a "suggestive edge" or "flowing contour" against that vital background with which they form a symbiotic unity.

In one draft of Apocalypse, Lawrence asserts that "the essential feeling in all art is religious" (155); in another, that "[all] poetry is religious in its movement"--the movement being that of "vivid association" (190) or "metaphoric process." In "Making Pictures," he asserts that "[a]rt is a form of religion," and in "Hymns in a Man's Life," he identifies "the sense of wonder" with "the religious element inherent in all life" (Phoenix II 605, 599). The "instinctive act of synthesis" (Apocalypse 190) links poetic and religious vision with cosmic awareness, demanding the fullest response to vital impulses, while prophetic modes of vision demand correspondingly eloquent expression. Levin affirms that