William Garry Watson
University of Alberta, Canada
On desire: where Lawrence remains most challenging today
He [Birkin] was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people … they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation he said … They acted and re-acted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting ... None of them transcended the given terms.
--D.H.Lawrence (Women in Love 305)
[T]o my knowledge at least, the only texts that ever discovered mimetic desire and explored some of its consequences are literary texts. I am speaking here … of a relatively small group of works. In these works, human relations conform to the complex process of strategies and conflicts, misunderstandings and delusions that stem from the mimetic nature of human desire. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, these works reveal the laws of mimetic desire.
--René Girard ("To double business bound" vii-viii)
This paper comes in two parts. In Part One I will argue that, judging by what Lawrence himself shows us both in Women and Love and in many of his other major works also, the "few great laws" which Birkin thinks largely determine the behaviour of people nowadays are best understood as the laws of what Girard calls sometimes mimetic, and sometimes triangular, desire. Think, for example, of the moment in "The Ladybird" when we are told that, "as so often happens, in this life based on the wicked triangle, Basil could not follow his enthusiasm for the Count save in his wife's presence" (204). Or consider Gudrun's attempt to persuade herself towards the end of Women in Love that Gerald's death should not be seen as "an example of the eternal triangle" in action since "the presence of the third party [Loerke] was a mere contingency—an inevitable contingency perhaps, but a contingency none the less" (477). If, as Gudrun concedes, this contingency is inevitable then it would seem that the triangle in question has exerted a determining influence after all.
But if, on the one hand, Lawrence's major works show human relations conforming time and time again (and in richly fascinating ways) "to the complex process of strategies and conflicts, misunderstandings and delusions that stem from the mimetic nature of human desire," they also show characters escaping the negative effects of the laws governing mimetic desire, characters who remain "mystically interesting" precisely to the extent that they manage to transcend the given terms. It is the significance of this achievement, which I take to constitute a major challenge to Girard's argument for Christianity (his Antropology of the Cross), that I will be focussing on in Part Two of the paper.