48
EUGENE GOODHEART
Birkin rejects the Mrican way because it involves dreadful mysteries
beyond the phallic cult. He asks himself, "How far in their inverted
culture, had these West Mricans gone beyond phallic knowledge?"
And in imagining the distance-"the goodness, the holiness, the
desire for creation must have lapsed"-Birkin recoils in fear from it.
The mysteries from which he recoils are doubtless Dionysian
mysteries, the marvelous and terrible experience in which man is
"led back to the very heart of nature." In
The Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche understood this experience as a moment when "the ,state
and society, and, in general, the gulfs between man and man give
way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very
heart of nature." Elsewhere he characterizes the Dionysian festival
as a time when "all of Nature's excess in joy, sorrow and knowledge
become audible, even in piercing shrieks." Lawrence's instinct warn–
ed him that the consequence of an unmediated return to nature may
be, in Nietzsche's words, an "abyss of annhilation."
(The Woman
Who Rode Away,
for instance, can be read as a kind of cautionary
tale about the risks of the Dionysian.) But despite the fear of
being devoured by the experience, Lawrence's heroes constantly
court
it.
We find the fascination with the Dionysian in the follow–
ing passage from
The Woman Who Rode Away:
Only the eyes of the oldest were not anxious. Black and
fixed, and as if sightless they watched the sun, seeing beyond
the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was
power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep. deep
to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute
motionlessness he watched till the red sun should send his
ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike,
and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the
power.
In Lawrence's "Study of Thomas Hardy" there is a remarkably
vivid description of this state of being.
. . I wish we were all like kindled bonfires on the edge
of space, marking out the advance-posts. What is the aim of
self-preservation, but to carry us right to the firing line;
there what
is
is
in contact with what is not.
If
many lives
be
lost by the way, it cannot be helped, nor
if
much suffering
