50
EUGENE GOODHEART
The idea of the immanence of deity in the body (in the individual
body as wen as the body of the universe) is a powerful idea, and
it keeps its power only if its meaning is not reduced to an idea
which is really its opposite. To blur the distinction is to do what
a great deal of the criticism of Lawrence has tried to do: it is to
domesticate the tiger.
The action of
The Man Who Died
is the painful recovery of
the God in the body, which culminates in the man's passionate
embrace of the priestess of Isis. The fierce and raging physical life
that had earlier seemed resistant and defiant now responds to their
passion.
All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its
petals and swung round to look another way. The spring
was fulfilled, a contact was established, the man and the
woman were fulfilled of one another.
Significantly, the priestess of Isis is abandoned at the end of
The
Man Who Died,
having fulfilled her role as the conduit to the
mysteries of "the greater life of the body."
If
Lawrence is averse to Christianity, there remains nonethe–
less
his
deep attraction to the figure of Christ. Lawrence's Christ
retains the chastity, the purity of soul that marks the Christ of the
gospels. Before his embrace of the priestess of Isis there had been a
long and difficult "rebirth," in which the man had learned "the
irrevocable
noli me tangere
which separates the reborn from the
vulgar." Like the heroes of Lawrence's other novels, the man who
dies must resist the lure of false self-diminishing connections; in
reliving his old experiences with "humanity," with Madeleine, with
Judas, he undergoes a kind of purification.
It is hard not to read
The Man Who Died
as, in one sense, an
allegory on Lawrence himself. The man's speech to Madeleine, for
instance, unmistakably registers a personal note.
But my mission is over, and my teaching is finished and
death has saved me from my own salvation. Oh Madeleine,
I want to take my single way in life, which is my portion.
My public life is ,over, the life of my self-importance.
