Snake by D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence’s basic point is that we have gone from the Victorian era’s denial of the existence of sex to an acknowledgment of its existence that denies it any significance. For Lawrence, the phrase “casual sex” only makes sense if you are so alienated from your own flesh that you can think of your body as a sort of accident rather than as all and everything you are or will ever be in this material world. Lawrence believed that the people in his time (1885-1930) who thought of themselves as liberated from Victorian sexual mores were still operating within the framework of the Victorian era’s denial of the importance of bodily experience.

As a result, sex was trivialized to exactly the extent that it ceased to be taboo. “What’s the big deal about sex?” was the hipster response of Lawrence’s time to Victorian sexual norms. “Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.” a quote from Lady Chatterley's Lover, sums up this attitude perfectly. Lawrence felt that asking that question with a straight face meant that the individual who asked was as much out of contact with his body and his sexuality as any prude Victorian. The shift from Victorian prudery to thinking of sex as trivial was not, in Lawrence’s view, progress.

Lawrence felt that all meaningful human experience was bodily. We are all walking around in bodies and only meaningfully exist for one another through those bodies. Even conversation is one body sending out puffs of air (words) which are answered by other puffs of air. Even writing is only a way to represent those puffs of air visually so that we can virtually puff at people who are not really there in the flesh. Lawrence felt that sex was the most intense bodily experience, which, for him, meant the most intense experience, which we can share together. We become more powerfully and immediately present for one another during sex than at any other time, unless, of course, we are so alienated from our bodies that we can see sex as either trivial or taboo. Lawrence’s point is that both are equally awful.

  

Lawrence felt that we do not “have” our sexuality but “are” our sexuality. This is why we fear it. We fear its power. However, another quote from Lady Chatterley's Lover reading “The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.” shows us where denying the body leaves us. We fear our sexuality most of all and deny it most of all because we fear it but, for that same reason, denying it leaves us nothingness disguised in empty puffs of air. If you do not have the time to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the poem below sums up Lawrence’s point of view more briefly. The poem is so famous that, without going to the library, you can Google it to find as much commentary unpacking it as you could want.

D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before

me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of

the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923