Abstract
We are now in a position to consider Lawrence’s view of language in a broader, more analytical context. Towards the end of ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ Nietzsche makes a statement which anticipates a modernist idea of language. It also contains a directive for the poet-thinker:
The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
(Philosophy and Truth, p. 90)
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, in On the Way to Language ( New York: Harper & Row, 1982 ), pp. 57–108.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought ( New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ), pp. 143–61.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski ( New York and London: Routledge, 1994 ), pp. 24–5.
As Gerald L. Bruns points out in Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 6, there is not an ’analytique heideggerienne’.
Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, New Accents, general editor, Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–55; p. 55.
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© 1997 Fiona Becket
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Becket, F. (1997). ‘Forbidden Metaphors’: Lawrence and Language. In: D. H. Lawrence The Thinker as Poet. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378995_8
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