Abstract
What did it mean for Lawrence to connect the art of Paul Cézanne with the ‘actual existence’ of matter? The judgement was in no sense purely art-historical. Early in 1929, Lawrence completed ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, the essay in which the claim was made, and as the year progressed two further, sustained discursive essays, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Apocalypse, emerged. Despite their differing focuses, all three essays show Lawrence, at this late stage in his life, returning to the subject of science with renewed, if still highly critical, interest. Science, he wrote in a draft fragment of Apocalypse, had become a ‘nothingness’ of the same order as the atom which now, according to modern physics, was unimaginable; and therefore, ‘I give it up’ (A 164). Yet Lawrence had spent most of his creative life claiming to give science up, and the essays suggest that he still had not quite succeeded.
The actual fact is that in Cézanne modern French art made its first tiny step back to real substance, to objective substance, if we may call it so.… It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for several thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists.
‘Introduction to These Paintings’
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Notes
Marie Cariou, ‘Bergson: The Keyboards of Forgetting’, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 99–117.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 456.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 67.
For a fuller discussion of this point and others in this section, see my ‘Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation — Language and Process in The Origin of Species’, in D. Amigoni and J. Wallace (eds), Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species; New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 1–46.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1998), pp. vii–xxiv.
Tess Cosslett, ‘Introductory essay’, in Cosslett (ed.), Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 2.
Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (London: Secker and Warburg, 1942), p. 45.
Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1910; London: Wildwood House, 1981), p. 196.
Sources here are: J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966)
John H. Goldthorpe, ‘Herbert Spencer’, in Timothy Raison (ed.), The Founding Fathers of Social Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 76–83
Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850–1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)
T.H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’, in Collected Essays of T.H. Huxley, Vol. III: Science and Education (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 140–1.
James Paradis, T.H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 6
T.H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. viii.
D.H. Lawrence, Movements in Modern European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (1921; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 260–1.
See Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
Michael Payne and John Schad (eds.), Life.After.Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 95.
J.M. Coetzee, ‘Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, Journal of Literary Semantics 11 (1982), pp. 3–13
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© 2005 Jeff Wallace
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Wallace, J. (2005). Writing Matter: Science, Language and Materialism. In: D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287631_4
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