Since cfk, the regular Bookflurries host extraordinaire, is unfortunately computerless for a time, several of us are going to try to fill the gap in this series for that duration, yours truly being the first. To reiterate her customary introduction, the Bookflurries discussions encompass:
"...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape. You don't have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us."
The starting point tonight is a novella/long short story published in its final form in 1929. Thus this year marks the 80th anniversary of D.H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died. Given the title of this diary, the subject of the resurrection should be fairly obvious. Some intro background is necessary, about the story, but also about....
....the diarist. In the interest of semi-full disclosure, I have to confess to a few major intellectual limitations in writing this diary. The first is that I do not practice any particular organized religion and have no real education or background in any particular religion. Thus the deepest subtexts and references to Christianity in this story would pretty much escape me. So any readers here better versed than me about Christianity can fill in my gaps in understanding.
The second is that I'm not very well versed at all in D.H. Lawrence's work, pretty much limited to "The Rocking Horse Winner" from years ago in school. I have an old short story anthology that includes The Fox and "The Prussian Officer", and a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover on my shelf, unread. So if I actually got around to reading the latter before any other Lawrence, I'd be starting at the end, in terms of his literary output, rather than the beginning.
In addition, another bit of background to note is that Lawrence wrote this story over the time 1927-1928. Part One of the story was published in February 1928 under the title "The Escaped Cock". There is indeed a gamecock that is part of the story, in fact from the very opening sentence. However, after you've read Part Two, the double entendre of the title wouldn't be hard to guess, in the "nudge, nudge, know what I mean?" sense. This first title is the one the remained attached to the story when Lawrence was still alive. Following the revision of the story, with the addition of Part Two, the story was published in September 1929, before Lawrence's death in March 1930, by the Black Sun Press with the same title, but the 1931 publication had the newer title, which has remained since.
The resurrected figure in the story is understood to be Jesus Christ. It should be noted, however, that at no point in the story does Lawrence identity the man by name. Lawrence only refers to the character as "the man who had died". Yet various features clearly imply the identity of the resurrected "man who died" as Christ. At the tomb, for example, upon seeing a woman in mourning, the man recognizes here and calls out her name, "Madeleine", where she clearly is Mary Magdalene.
The story falls into two parts (note: all quotations from The Man Who Died are from the Vintage paperback edition, which is paired with St. Mawr). In Part One, the man realizes that he did not die on the cross, and thinks:
"To be back! To be back again, after all that!" (p. 166)
Recurring words/themes in the moments after he realizes that he is still alive include "nausea" and "disillusionment". Eugene Goodheart has commented as follows on this:
"With his keen religious intuition, Lawrence has subtly perceived the religious heresy of the Christian impulse towards self-transcendence. By trying to exceed the reach of his hands and feet in order to achieve communion with God - in order perhaps to become God - man is separated from God and diminished in the separation. The nausea, emptiness and disillusion that the man who died suffers are the 'rewards' Lawrence imagines for the sacrilege. Lawrence is presenting in a new way the old paradox of the Christian critique of the Renaissance conception of man - namely, that the centering of the universe around man makes for a diminution of his stature."
Citation: Eugene Goodheart, D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision University of Chicago Press (1963), pp. 149-150.
The man escapes from the tomb, and makes his way to the house of the farmer who owns the "escaped cock". The man tells the farmer:
"Don't be afraid. I am not dead. They took me down too soon. So I have risen up. Yet if they discover me, they will do it all over again...." (p. 168)
In a reworking of His meeting with Mary Magdalene, as originally told in John 20:11-18, the man reflects to Madeleine further on his state:
"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. Now I can wait on life, and say nothing, and have no one betray me." (p. 174)
Madeleine asks of the man:
"And will you not come back to us? Have you risen for yourself alone?" (p. 175)
After reflecting on this question and "the sarcasm in her voice", the man replies:
"I have not risen from the dead in order to seek death again." (p. 175)
A moment later, and only to himself, the man thinks:
"Now my own followers will want to do me to death again, for having risen up different from their expectations." (p. 175)
(Sidebar: can anyone here say "purity police"?)
The man leaves the farmer, with the "escaped cock" as companion, but then leaves the chicken with an innkeeper along the way. Before that, though, Lawrence reworks the meeting between Jesus and the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), where the man does not reveal his identity by breaking bread with the disciples, but simply said "in his old voice: 'Know ye me not?'"
In Part Two, the man has made his way to Lebanon, where he sees a temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. Lawrence describes the Isis of this temple as follows:
"She was looking for the fragments of the dead Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in fragments over the wide world. And she must find his hands and his feet, his heart, his thighs, his head, his belly, she must gather him together and fold her arms around the re-assembled body till it became warm again, and roused to life, and could embrace her, and could fecundate her womb." (p. 188)
The priestess of the temple has tended the temple for 7 years, and in keeping with the spirit of Isis, is waiting for the man who will fulfill the mission of the regeneration of Osiris. She has known men from Rome, Caesar and "Anthony" (Marc Antony), and Egypt, but none proved to be "the one". In fact, after asking a philosopher the question:
"Are all women born to be given to men?" (p. 189)
He responds to her at length, and concludes:
"But for the golden brief day-suns of show such as Anthony, and for the hard winter suns of power, such as Caesar, the lotus stirs not nor will ever stir. Those will only tear open the bud. Ah, I tell you, wait for the re-born and wait for the bud to stir." (pp. 189-190)
One noteworthy feature of the man's attitude as he first meets the temple priestess is that he does not adopt the "thou shalt have no other gods before me" attitude that contemporary wingnuts would have, even if it may be only out of politeness (after all, "when in Rome..."):
'"O Madam, whose shelter may I implore?"....
"It is Isis in search," she said....
"The goddess is great," he replied." (p. 190)
Her initial impression of the man is one of "mistrust", and one of her slaves even tries to convince her that the man is a criminal and fugitive. Yet her opinion pretty quickly begins to shift:
"Yet she looked at the sleeping face. It was worn, hollow, and rather ugly. But, a true priestess, she saw the other kind of beauty in it, the sheer stillness of the deeper life....
There was a beauty of much suffering, and the strange calm candour of finer life in the whole delicate ugliness of the face. For the first time, she was touched on the quick at the sight of a man, as if the tip of a fine flame of living had touched her." (pp. 192-193)
You can imagine where things go from there, on a purely narrative level. Yet the relationship between the man and the priestess is not merely about carnal knowledge. It is true that the depiction of the man's sexual arousal can border at times on ribald "high art" campery, with wordplay that intertwines subtexts of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and sexuality, with lines like "I am risen!" and "Father! Why did you hide this from me?" (both from p. 207). You'll either laugh or want to toss the book at the wall.
However, the priestess does heal the man's wounds and scars suffered while on the cross out of compassion, and not out of mere attraction. In fact, the priestess sees the man as potentially "the one" to fulfill her mission of worship, of bringing Osiris back to life in honor of Isis. Sexuality is not something repulsive or antithetical in the context of her devotion, but the ultimate act of fulfillment with the "chosen one" to complete her mission. In essence, the priestess heals the man in every sense, and she does get from their consummation what she most desires from her devotion to Isis. M. Elizabeth Wallace elaborates on this:
"Lawrence makes thinkable his idea about the resurrection by imagining a cross-fertilization between Christian and pagan traditions. Christianity's uncertain valuation of the body is transformed in the tale by a more ancient tradition that celebrates fertility goddesses, gods that die and are resurrected each spring, and sacred marriages between the two that ensure the world's fruitfulness. In this older tradition one celibate, male god would seem an inadequate image for the life of humanity, but Lawrence did not want to dismiss Christianity. His artistic solution was to extend and complicate it, to include it without reduction in a large context within another religious tradition.
"He had used this method in the Studies of Thomas Hardy, discovering fruitful relationships between concepts that contradicted each other. In The Man Who Died these very contradictions and juxtapositions - especially of body and spirit, male and female - disrupt our old ways of thinking. Readers of Lawrence's tale are shocked by its 'disturbing connection of godhead with sexuality' [Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, Pantheon (New York, 1983)] and by the presence of woman as priestess, a woman as powerful in serving her goddess as the man in serving his god. In this resurrection account, woman is not follower, mourner, observer, but equal - a virgin in the ancient sense of singleness and devotion to a calling. The priestess serves a fertility goddess whose religion can easily incorporate, as Osiris, the hitherto sterile man-who-died. On the deepest level the priestess impregnates the man, making potent and fruitful his barren religion, previously blind to the profound mystery of body, creation and physical communion."
Citation: M. Elizabeth Wallace, "The Circling Hawk", from The Challenge of D.H. Lawrence, edited by Michael Squires and Keith Cushman. University of Wisconsin Press (1990), p. 116.
This is where you guys now come in, regarding other literary treatments of the Resurrection. The only example that I can think of, which I've actually read, immediately is William Faulkner's 1955 novel A Fable, where Christ returns as a French corporal during World War I who persuades his comrades to stop fighting at one point during a prolonged stretch of trench warfare.
(One of Leo Tolstoy's late novels is called Resurrection, but I haven't read it, so I can't comment on it.)
With the general idea of resurrection, I suppose also that in a way, the Harry Potter series contains an element of dark parody of the idea, regarding Voldemort. Two other more folk-oriented renditions of the idea of resurrection, especially in the rather gruesome context of restoring dismembered personages back to wholeness and life, are:
(1) Runos XIV and XV of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, where Lemminkäinen has been brutally killed and dismembered in Tuonela, the land of death, after the cowherd Markahattu has lured him there. His mother travels to Tuonela, essentially tracks down the various body parts of her son, and reassembles him and brings him back to life.
(2) The Czech author Karel Erben had published a collection of folk tales, retold in his own verse form, under the title Kytice z pověstí národních (A Garland of National Myths). Some of them are very violent, such as Zlatý kolovrat (The Golden Spinning Wheel). You can read more about it here, but suffice it to say that what happens to the good stepdaughter Dornička is comparable to Lemminkäinen.
If interested, you can look at a few recent book-themed diaries on DK:
(1) hegemony57's diary on Graham Greene and The Quiet American
(2) toedrifter's diary on Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music, related to Walter Cronkite
(3) sensibleshoes has the latest Write On! entry here.
(4) NellaSelin has this diary about a now-obscure physicist and a book that was influential in its time about the idea of space travel, based on a doctoral dissertation.
(5) A Siegel has this recent diary about energy-related books.
(6) NMDad has this diary about childrens' books and reading to children in general.
(7) plf515 has this diary about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
(8) SusanG has this review of two novels, Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage.
(9) webranding has this diary about Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
(10) GlowNz has this tribute to Frank McCourt, who died this past weekend.
(11) intrepidliberal has this diary about author Andrea Batista Schlesinger.
(12) Kascade Kat has this diary about David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.
(13) Likewise, sarahnity has a Books by Kossacks diary.
(14) plf515 has today's edition of 'What are you reading?'.
(15) Tomorrow, Upper West is hosting a chat/diary session with Jay Neugeboren.
So if you've got anything to talk about related to books, to the topic here, or whatever you're reading right now, comments and discussion welcome below. If anyone is interested in covering Bookflurries one Wednesday night through at least the end of August, please indicate in your comment your availability and which date you'd want.
However, to give Lawrence the last word, I couldn't resist quoting this line, during the reworked "Emmaus" scene, where the man thinks to himself:
"....for a dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief, who denies the right of his neighbour to be left alone." (p. 183)