The Flight to Woman

Extract

Karl Stern writes in The Flight from Woman of a male-female polarity which runs through life, and suggests that it is a kind of ultimate, ‘anchored in the absolute’. One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘two principles’, a male and female polarity at the heart of things. To Lawrence the work of the male is to actualise, to bring into being, the turbulent potentiality of the Flesh, a disturbing darkness which is prior to rationality, morality and value, and which is ambivalently savage and tender.

This conviction that there is an area of dionysiac darkness and force within men, to be tapped, to be entered, a further resource of power beyond the polite liberal enclosures of conscious awareness, may go back to the nineteenth century to Schopenhauer (who believed in and feared it) and Nietzsche (who affirmed it) but it is a twentieth-century creed, confirmed by Freud and by the shock with which men have recognised their own violent depths. What are we to do? The familiar answer is that we are to accept the dark, this female pre-rational source, as the really ultimate thing which defines us as what we really or intrinsically are. So – obviously – this is what we ought to be. The hunger for extreme situations, for shock, for the perverse, which one meets for example in Antonin Artaud or in Genet, is a sign of this almost metaphysical belief in a deeper passional ground to which we must break through by violence, abandoning the tight restrictive world of morality and conduct.