LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
59
in keen struggle with the need to keep faithful to a vision that was
anarchically individual, explosive and subversive. His impulse to
argue for the vision represents an effort to join, in Malraux's phrase,
his "madness to the universe." We respect the vision, but we can–
not embrace it as doctrine. Between Lawrence and every serious
reader of him there must be, I believe, a permanent tension: a
sense of provocation and danger.
Lawrence is like Blake and Nietzsche, an artist beyond good
and evil who compels our admiration and mistrust. Like Christ,
Lawrence enters the human community
a
stranger and an enemy,
possessed by a vision so subversive and dangerous that he can be
endured only if he modifies
it
in communicating it- or if he is
misunderstood. Lawrence does modify his vision and he has been,
understandably, misunderstood: that is, made to serve the gods of
a humanistic civilization. This too has been the fate of Blake and
Nietzsche.
(This essay is one of a series of revaluations of modern writers. Some
of these essays will appear in a collection edited by Steven Marcus
and Richard Poirier.)
