12
PARTISAN REVIEW
can fail to recognize. As a reflection of the formal and qualitative
disintegration of human life at present, it is more compelling than the
jeremiads of the reformers, the analyses of the psychologists, or the
charts of the economists. Lawrence was not primarily a social critic,
as some people have insistently maintained, but his
epos
is a damn-
ing criticism not only of our socio-economic organization but of our
whole culture to its roots. This is not to say that he was a mere product
of this culture; the psychoanalysts can make an equally convincing
case along quite different lines. Mter all, the pattern to which he
conformed was something much older even than our culture. It is
necessary to make this point very clear because the conclusion must
not be, as Lawrence himself insisted, that we can solve everything by
an immediate fiat of the intellectual will. Finally, the meaning of his
myth is that whatever rational program we do undertake to alter the
external situation must take sufficient account of that side of life to
which he gave such fanatical allegiance.
In his last years Lawrence was much fascinated by a conception
which, if he had lived long enough to develop, might have led to a
different solution to his many problems. It is the notion of the Greek
"gods of limits," the Dioscouri, or Heavenly Twins, who divided all
things between thcm-earth and sky, Heaven and Hades, the upper
and lower regions of consciousness. In
Apocalypse
Lawrence tells us
a great deal more about them: they were "witnesses," for example,
to Adonai, the lord of life. They were "rivals, dividers, separators, for
good as well as for evil: balancers." But, characteristically enough,
Lawrence is more impressed by their negative aspect as sunderers or
destroyers than as balancers between opposites. To him they seem
to appear at successivemoments of time rather than simultaneously.
They tend to cancel each other out rather than to define the unity of
whatever is the organism in which they are present. But to the Greek
mind, to which they were above all witnesses to something, their
principal function must have been that of definition. From such a
brief summary it mayor may not be evident how such a notion may
be related to the dialectic or process type of thinking, which in its
various expressions, is perhaps the characteristic type of thinking of
our time. With little difficulty "the gods of limits" can be appropriated
to the needs of much modern philosophy, psychology, politics, and
science.
For the present discussion they are useful as another restatement
of the nature-reason antithesis that has been suggested as the real
problem behind the Lawrence myth. If human life is a process that
is in turn defined by these two processes, if it is divided between them,
it is something that can be supported only if we can imagine at least
