EUGENE GOODHEART
early; he himself would have recanted his teaching had he reached
my age. Noble enough was he to recant."
The Man Who Died
begins on an ironic note. Lawrence's
Christ
is
miraculously recalled to life by a "loud and splitting"
cock crow. Pained and disillusioned, he discovers that the world he
tried to deny for the illusory glory of eternal life has its own undying
glory. "The world, the same as ever the natural world, thronging
with greenness, a nightingale singing winsomely, wistfully, coaxing–
ly calling from the bushes beside a runnel of water, in the world,
the natural world of morning and evening, forever undying, from
which he had died."
With
his
keen religious intuition, Lawrence has perceived the
religious heresy of the Christian impulse toward self-transcendence.
By trying to exceed the reach of his hands and feet in order to
achieve communion with God, man is separated from God and
diminished in the separation. The nausea, emptiness and disillu–
sion that the man suffers are the punishments that Lawrence
,imagines for the sacrilege. Lawrence is presenting in a new way
the old paradox of the Christian critique of the Renaissance con–
ception of man: that the centering of the universe around man re–
sults in a diminution of his stature. As Lawrence exploits the
paradox, however, man in his full splendor and potency is con–
ceived according to the Renaissance model. For Lawrence, as for
every religious writer, the imagination of divinity and the imagina–
tion of the self are inextricably bound together. Karl Jaspers, the
Christian Existentialist, remarks that the question "'what is man?'
must be complemented by the essential question whether and what
Transcendence (Deity) is."
As
the imagination of divinity fails
so does the imagination of the self. Lawrence's loathing of modern
literature derives in part from a feeling that it offers us the
spectacle of small selves in a godless universe, attempting to achieve
significance through a psychological magnification of their most
trivial feelings. ("... it is self-consciousness, picked into such fine
bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go
by the smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce
and Mrs. Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their emotions
to the finest threads.")
The effect of. Lawrence's contempt for what he called "the
