Writing Matter: Science, Language and Materialism

Abstract

What did it mean for Lawrence to connect the art of Paul Cézanne with the ‘actual existence’ of matter? The judgement was in no sense purely art-historical. Early in 1929, Lawrence completed ‘Introduction to These Paintings’, the essay in which the claim was made, and as the year progressed two further, sustained discursive essays, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Apocalypse, emerged. Despite their differing focuses, all three essays show Lawrence, at this late stage in his life, returning to the subject of science with renewed, if still highly critical, interest. Science, he wrote in a draft fragment of Apocalypse, had become a ‘nothingness’ of the same order as the atom which now, according to modern physics, was unimaginable; and therefore, ‘I give it up’ (A 164). Yet Lawrence had spent most of his creative life claiming to give science up, and the essays suggest that he still had not quite succeeded.

The actual fact is that in Cézanne modern French art made its first tiny step back to real substance, to objective substance, if we may call it so.… It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for several thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists.

‘Introduction to These Paintings’