MDMD(8) Blutbruederschaft, Lawrence and Pynchon

[Christine Karatnytsky]

Quoth Sojourner re Maire and Learned:
 
>Interesting, but I hesitate to jump into this too much simply because
>church doctrine is so involved.  Any Loyolans here who might
>be able to offer their take on this.

I don't know to which church doctrine you think Maire may be
referring.  I hate to impose the reading of my openers on you because, 
goodness knows, I hardly read any of *your* mail anymore, but I
really do believe that I have explained the point as well as I'm able 
in this forum--there and in my other recent post about Learned.
     
>Bruederschaft:   brotherhood, fraternity
>Is this the same CK?
   
Yes.  I left out the "Blut" part, though:  Blutbruederschaft. 
Blood-brotherhood.
     
A key concept in Lawrence, specifically in Women in Love, the
Blutbruederschaft is a lasting bond in an intimate friendship between
men.  Lawrence postulates the idea--the counterpart of which is a similar
union of completion between a man and a woman--through his alter-ego,
Rupert Birkin, a school inspector.  Birkin, recognizing an emptiness, a
coldness, in his friend, Gerald Crich, the son of the local colliery
owner, offers him the possibility of love and friendship, based on this
somewhat radical idea:

Quite other things were going through Birkin's mind.  Suddenly he saw
himself confronted with another problem--the problem of love and eternal
conjunction between two men.  Of course this was necessary--it had been a
necessity inside himself all his life--to love a man purely and fully. 
Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.
     
[...]
    
"You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blutbruederschaft,"
he said to Gerald, with a new happy activity in his eyes.
     
"Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other's blood into the
cut?" said Gerald.
    
"Yes--and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives.
 This is what we ought to do.  No wounds, that is obsolete.  But we ought
to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly,
finally, without any possibility of going back on it."  (p.198, Viking)
     

The tricky thing is that a certain physical intimacy between the men is
inherent in the idea.  Rupert says, in the famous chapter entitled
Gladiatorial: "We are mentally, spiritually intimate, therefore we should
be physically intimate too--it is more the whole."  This somewhat muddies
the concept, if one is attempting to interpret strictly.  It becomes a
little unclear, given the steamy sexual
nature of the book, if an actual *homosexual* love is what is being
described--and suppressed.  An argument can be made in this area, I
think, as Lawrence can tend toward the turgid...or the turbid...or both. 
(Or is that the turbot?)
  
On the other hand, he might intend, more simply, the physical nature of
man's human self to be accepted without self-consciousness or repression.
 Something more along the lines of what is being explored in the modern
"men's movement"--the drum beating and sweat lodge bonding sort of thing.
 It is a somewhat grey area into which I do not believe Pynchon delves. 
In this sense, *if* the relationship between Mason and Dixon is a
realization of the Blutbruederschaft, Pynchon may have achieved purely
what Lawrence only posited as an ideal.  (For, in fact, Gerald rejects
Rupert's offer, even though he comes close to comprehending it.)  In
Gladiatorial, Rupert and Gerald strip and wrestle naked in front of a
fireplace--a scene highly-charged with eroticism, to put it mildly:
     
So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and 
nearer.  Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he
was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense.  He seemed to penetrate
into Gerald's more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body
through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection,
always seizing with some rapid necromantic foreknowledge every motion of
the other flesh...
     
Well, whew, you get the idea.  Needless to say the relationship of Mason
and Dixon, even at the height of its intimacy, doesn't begin to approach
this hot wrestling stuff.  Fishing may be a metaphor for something, but
it sure isn't sex.  At the end of W in L, Rupert and Ursula Brangwen
approach a closer union, but Gerald sinks into despair, destructiveness,
and sterility--and ultimately dies.  Rupert experiences the deep
wrenching grief of the bereft.  Like Charles Mason at Dixon's grave. 
It's what happens when your Mate dies.  "Those who die, and dying still
can love, still believe, do not die.  They live still in the beloved. 
Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after
death.  He might have lived with his friend, a further life."  (p. 471,
Viking)

Though Lawrence is admired for his sensitivity towards and understanding
of women, W in L is very much a man's book, too.  If there *is* such a
thing.  Yeah, there is much in this book to connect with Pynchon.  Not to
mention all of the stuff about the women, the other mates...

While I'm running with this Lawrence jag, let me say that in W in L, the
mastery of humans over animals--indeed the *cruelty* of humans over
animals--is a point of departure from Pynchon.  A horse is beaten by
Gerald in one scene, and in another, davemarc's famous rabbit,
incongruously named Bismarck, receives some rather nasty treatment--and
gets to fight back a bit before he is subdued.  Also, continuing with the
idea of "mechanicalness" I quoted yesterday, is this, which, again,
speaks directly to V.:

There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but
satisfying in
its very destructiveness.  The men [of the pits] were satisfied to belong
to 
this great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them.  It was 
what they wanted.  It was the highest that man had produced, the most
wonderful and superhuman.  They were exalted by belonging to this great
and superhuman system which was beyond feeling or reason, something
really godlike.  Their hearts died within them, but their souls were
satisfied.  It was what they wanted.  Otherwise Gerald could never have
done what he did.  He was just ahead of them in giving them what they
wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system that subjected
life to pure mathematical principles.  This was a sort of freedom, the
sort they really wanted.  It was the first step in undoing, the first
great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for
the organic, the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity,
and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical
purpose.  It was pure organic destruction and pure mechanical
organization.  This is the first and finest state of chaos.  (p. 223,
Viking)
     
Lawrence, you may have guessed by now, is one of my favorites and a true
visionary, especially in male-female relations.  A great lyrical
novelist.  The soul of a poet.  

What was the question?

Chris

(The film was made by good old Ken Russell in 1969, and starred Alan
Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her
performance, and Jennie Linden.)