The Text-Body Connection: Character as Fetish In The Plumed Serpent

For both Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence, healing the “psyche,” whether defined as mind or soul, means acknowledging that consciousness is continuous with the unconscious. This is true despite the seeming dichotomy between Lawrence's fervent irrationalism and Freud's indefatigable rationalism; both are motivated by an anti-idealism based on the detranscendentalizing notion that consciousness is a function of physiology. Consciousness, as a by-product of the brain rather than a phenomenon of mind, is dominated by the unconscious, while the unconscious, in turn, is the voice of the body. If, as Freud and Lawrence argue, the body “speaks” the unconscious, and if, as Jacques Lacan says, the unconscious “speaks” the “I” (“I” meaning the subject or self, rather than the ego), then it might not be going too far to say that the body is the source for what we think of as the “I.” Following this line of reasoning, the body becomes, by implication, the ultimate referent of all representation, all discourse, all signifiers. This raises certain questions about the relation between language and the body from which it emerges: When we speak, are we always, however unconsciously, speaking the needs and wishes of the body? To what extent, then, should language be thought of as embodiment, as symbol, rather than sign?

I am putting Freud and Lawrence together in this essay because they approach this problem from opposite directions and therefore give us two mirroring illuminations of an elusive object. Here is one way to formulate their antithetical yet complementary approaches. Ricoeur (1970) says that for Freud psychoanalysis is preeminently “the great work of ‘becoming conscious’” (p. 412). For Lawrence, on the other hand, art, and by extension life, is the great work of becoming unconscious. “Sum, ergo non cogito”, writes Lawrence (1929)