ABSTRACT
Since my interest is in Lawrence's total achievement, I have not followed the usual habit of Lawrence's critics of dividing my work into separate discussions of individual books. In all the chapters I move freely among his essays and his fiction. The first chapter aims at defining Lawrence's utopianism by placing it in a tradition of "tablet-breakers" (Nietzsche's phrase) and then considering some of the peculiar consequences i t has for his art. The effort in the following chapters is to show the effect of Lawrence's utopianism on his views of nature, myth, and religious experience. Lawrence's ideas are not viewed as separate from his art; on the contrary, my attention is to the ways in which art and idea function-or fail to function-integrally in Lawrence's work. The study of his utopianism leads inevitably to his vision of "the greater life of the body," which is the subject of the fourth chapter. O f particular relevance to this vision is Nietzsche's conception of the Dionysian and the Apollonian as it is developed in The Birth of Tragedy. "The power-urge" which preoccupied Lawrence during the "dark period" of his career is shown to be no sudden invention of Lawrence's but the full emergence of the Dionysian theme which is present in almost all his work. Consequently, Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo, the novels of the "dark period," which are either ignored or disparaged by critics, are given serious attention in the fifth chapter. The theme of power becomes the basis of a fresh interpretation of The Man Who Died, the masterpiece of the final period. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Lawrence's version of the Christ story. Lawrence's bond with Jesus, the bond of one tablet-breaker with another, and
his hostility to Christianity, already anticipated in the chapter on the religious character of his imagination, are discussed in connection with writers who were in a comparable relation to the Christian tradition: Blake, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. The study concludes with an emphasis on the visionary character of Lawrence's work and an evaluation of its importance for civilization.
