58
EUGENE GOODHEART
idea that the sexual impulse is the deepest impulse in man and
consequently the essential "motivity" of the unconscious. The im–
pulse of "higher importance, and greater dynamic power" is "the
desire of the human male to build a world . . . to build up out of
his own self and his own belief and his own effort something
wonderful." Lawrence asserts that the "religious or creative co–
tive" is "the first motive for
all
human activity." The unconscious
is the divine presence in man from which all genuine civilization
draws its energy. Civilization and culture, which have always been
conceived to exist under the aegis of Apollo, the god that brings
order to the wild Dionysian energies at large in the world, are con–
ceived by Lawrence as products of those energies themselves.
Lawrence conceives of culture in its ideal form as a fulfillment of
the passional-visionary self, whereas Freud has the view that there
exists a generic tragic opposition between the passional self and
culture.
. . . Even the Panama Canal would never have been built
simply
to let ships through.
It
is the pure disinterested craving
of the human male to make something wonderful out of his
own head and his own self, - and his own soul's faith and
delight, which starts everything going.
The opposition between Apollo and Dionysus is then a perverse
contrivance of civilization in its present form, and the violence and
destructiveness of the passional life is a function of the opposition
between the gods, not a generic truth about the passional life itself.
The destructiveness of the passional life is really its resentment at
the repression from which it has suffered.
Lawrence never tells us how we can recover an unresentful
passion after all those years of repression. Though he may be able
to resolve the dualism in argument, Lawrence's imaginative work
reveals the opposition between the visionary and the ethical at
every moment. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale." Lawrence's
argument in
Fantasia of the Unconscious
often reads like the
casuistry against which he directed his fire when he discovered it
in other writers. But it is a casuistry with which we must sympathize,
for
it
reflects the anxious atmosphere in which he worked: the need
to connect with others, to participate
in
the human communion was
