Because poetry participates in the rhythmic, the musical, and the incantatory, the poetic representation of animal being is particularly salient to a discussion of cosmic and aesthetic forces. Moreover, as Jorie Graham explained during the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, poetry must be recognized as bodily experience. During her festival presentations Graham reiterated that reading and hearing poetry are not primarily cognitive but rather somatic processes. Such a claim forces us to rethink some of our more conventional notions about literature, the body, and even the creaturely. I want to suggest that one of D. H. Lawrence’s often-anthologized animal poems, “Tortoise Shout,” reveals an aesthetics of poetry that is rooted in bodily experience, in which the nonhuman voice functions within the context of the Deleuzian refrain. That voice—the shout of the tortoise—carries a rhythmic force that connects human to animal and both to broader cosmological powers in a posthumanist becoming-artistic of the living.
Elizabeth Grosz’s work on aesthetics and inhuman forces is useful as we investigate Lawrence’s poetic achievement in this text. Working among theories ranging from Deleuze to French feminism and her own rereading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Grosz (2005) asserts, in an interview with Julie Copeland, that we need to understand art as “the revelry in the excess of nature, but also a revelry in the excess of the energy in our bodies” (p. 2). Grosz makes the provocative claim that “we’re not the first artists and we’re perhaps not even the greatest artists, we humans; we take our cue from the animal world. So what appeals to us? It’s the striking beauty of flowers, it’s the amazing colour of birds, it’s the songs of birds” (p. 2). Grosz maintains that art is not primarily conceptual or linked to representation, but rather that art’s “fundamental goal is to produce sensations”; “it’s about feeling something intensely [while] there may be the by-product of a kind of understanding” (p. 3).
In what may first seem a counterintuitive locating of the artistic outside of human praxis, Grosz (2008) asserts that the intersection of life itself with earthly or even cosmic forces serves as the occasion for what is fundamentally an aesthetic emergence. Grosz describes the “productive explosion of the arts from the provocations posed by the forces of the earth … with the forces of living bodies, by no means exclusively human, which … slow down chaos enough to extract from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organization of color or movement that eventually, transformed, enables and induces art” (p. 3). In the aforementioned interview, Grosz (2005) goes on to emphasize the way that her ideas decenter the traditional attribution of art to an elevated, human function: “I think what’s radical about what I’m saying is that art isn’t primarily or solely conceptual, that what it represents is the most animal part of us rather than the most human part of us. Frankly, I find it really refreshing, in a way, that it’s not man’s nobility that produces art, it’s man’s animality that produces art, and that’s what makes it of potential interest everywhere” (p. 3).
Before we turn to the particular work of this essay and its examination of Lawrence’s poetics, it is important to locate Grosz’s claims within the Deleuzian framework that she outlines in her own discussion of the artistic. Deleuze rejects the notion that art is primarily to be understood in terms of intention or representation. Rather, as Grosz (2008) explains, Deleuze suggests that “the arts produce and generate intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifies sensation. Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs” (p. 3). Readers will recognize the Deleuzian emphasis on intensities here, and Grosz reminds us that the idea of the affective in Deleuze involves a linkage between bodily forces and “cosmological forces,” a linkage that emphasizes the human participation in the nonhuman (p. 3).
It is somewhat remarkable to note in this context what Fiona Becket pointed out in her 1997 study, D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. Lawrence, she reminds us, “confirms the inseparability of the aesthetic and the ontological,” especially through his concept of “art-speech” as that which “will play fruitfully across the centers and plexuses of the body of the reader” (p. 29). One segment from Lawrence’s writings is particularly salient to our discussion. It comes from his work The Symbolic Meaning and explains this concept of art-speech:
Art-speech is also a language of pure symbols. But whereas the authorized symbol stands always for a thought or an idea, some mental concept, the art-symbol or art-term stands for a pure experience, emotional and passional, spiritual and perceptual, all at once. The intellectual idea remains implicit, latent and nascent. Art communicates a state of being—whereas the symbol at best only communicates a whole thought, an emotional idea. Art-speech is a use of symbols which are pulsations on the blood and seizures upon the nerves, and at the same time pure percepts of the mind and pure terms of spiritual aspiration.
(Cited in Becket 1997:29–30, second emphasis mine)
Given these claims about art impacting the nervous system, when Grosz (2008) refines her discussion about artistic production as that which “merges with, intensifies and eternalizes or monumentalizes, sensation” (p. 4), we realize that Lawrence’s body of work, his life’s work, really—with all its investment in the concept of “blood consciousness”—is especially resonant for our purposes.
I want to examine this posthumanist concept of art in D. H. Lawrence’s poem, “Tortoise Shout” (see the complete poem in the appendix of this chapter). This text provides an astonishingly rich and provocative example of the kind of transspecies participation in becoming-artistic toward which Grosz’s work points. Indeed, the way in which the poem situates a becoming-artistic of the creaturely, specifically through the medium of sexual difference and sexual behavior, marks it as an extraordinary example of these particular concepts in literary discourse.
It is useful, at the outset of our discussion, to note both the factual or scientific realities of the tortoise and also the mythic or symbolic resonance it has tended to carry across cultures. Peter Young’s book, Tortoise, in the recent Reaktion Books Animal series, helps us with some preliminary situating in this regard. Young (2003) notes in the opening pages of his discussion: “Tortoises look and are old, almost mythical creatures. They are primeval, the oldest of the living land reptiles, their age confirmed by fossil remains. Tortoises are the surviving link between animal life in water and on land…. Tortoises … have survived for some 225 million years. They are living fossils. Hardy, self-contained creatures, they have endured aeons of major changes, and on a world scale survived geological upheaval, volcanic activity and climatic swings” (pp. 7–8). Amidst a good deal of further biological information, such as the advanced age to which tortoises often live, Young makes note of one fact that our poem takes as its focus: the coitus cry of the male. “Tortoises,” he explains, “are basically mute, except for males squealing with delight, sometimes with open mouth, at the climax of mating” (p. 22). In fact, my further investigation suggests that the mating call, or cry, is often very pronounced during the mounting phase in some tortoises, and may continue during segments of the often protracted coitus. Thus it may be more accurate to say that the tortoise is basically mute, except for the male crying during mating activities.
We might also take notice of Young’s chapter “Myths and Symbols.” Like most animals, tortoises have been subject to varying and sometimes contradictory symbolic use by human cultures. We are familiar with the recurring association of tortoises with qualities such as longevity and perseverance. However, Young reminds us that an astonishingly broad array of cultures have symmetrical creation myths that see the tortoise as supporting, literally, the world itself on its back, sometimes simultaneously as a “model of the world itself” (p. 42). He provides an interesting theory on the historical “route” of these myths, but also makes the Jungian claim that the tortoise seems to have an archetypal presence in “the collective unconscious of the human race” (p. 47). For our purposes, I want to note that the centrality of the tortoise in myths of creation—its association with a truly rudimentary force of generation—gives us an especially poignant purchase on Lawrence’s use of the tortoise.
The poem, which ultimately runs to about one hundred twenty lines, begins with three short ones: “I thought he was dumb, / I said he was dumb, / Yet I’ve heard him cry” (lines 1–3). These opening observations emphasize several important elements of the text to come. Like some of Lawrence’s other poems, perhaps most famously “Snake” and “Fish,” as I have argued elsewhere, the ineptitude, misapprehension, or limit of human knowledge is made immediately evident (see Rohman 2009). These three lines signal that the human speaker was wrong about the animal’s “dumbness” or muteness. What is more, Lawrence emphasizes human reason and language specifically. The narrator thought and then said the animal was dumb. Typically, reason and linguistic capacities are hailed as the hallmark of human superiority and dominion over the animal, yet here Lawrence acknowledges that his rational mind and speaking abilities were just plain mistaken. What is it that tells the truth about this animal or this event? It is what the speaker hears: the auditory sense. Not thinking or speaking in symbols, not representation or high-order analysis, but the body’s sensorium. And apparently this alternative knowledge, which in Lawrence’s terms would be blood-conscious knowledge rather than nerve-conscious knowledge, renders an immediate truth. I thought he was dumb, yet I heard him cry. At the instant when the body registers the tortoise’s voice, human assumptions about the animal are revealed as naive.
Lawrence’s choice of words here is not to be overlooked. He does not say that he thought the animal was silent; he says “dumb” instead. This word’s historical weight is apparent: The OED lists a reference to animal muteness as the word’s second primary meaning: “Applied to the lower animals (and, by extension, to inanimate nature) as naturally incapable of articulate speech.” Moreover, dumb’s polyvalence calls into question our assumptions that animals are stupid, “bestial,” unintelligent. He was wrong about animals being dumb. Animals are not dumb, and indeed their apparent muteness for the human does not indicate a mental vacuity. Similarly, the choice of cry in the opening stanza seems to emphasize something particular about animal emotion. Lawrence does use the word scream in the very next line, a term we would associate more with instinct or aggression or even simple physical distress. But the choice of cry suggests weeping, which clearly locates this creature in an emotional realm more akin to humans than alien from them.
Thus, in the second stanza, while Lawrence seems to suggest that the tortoise cry is distant, or obscure to us, we already know that this primal scream is in fact deeply shared in some way by the human. The stanza reads: “First faint scream, / Out of life’s unfathomable dawn, / Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim, / Far, far off, far scream” (lines 4–8). Rather than intimate that the scream is “far” ontologically from the human—foreign, that is, to human being—this stanza sets up the poem’s broad ideological claim that the tortoise brings us back to the fundamental, the primeval scream or vibration of the living in general. The scream may be far off to the hapless, unattending, or overly rationalized human passerby, caught unawares. But, as the text unfolds, we recognize how it brings the human speaker and the tortoise irrevocably into the same ontological space. This making coextensive of the human and tortoise takes place in large part through a discursive meditation on extremity.
I will come back to the specific image of the tortoise in extremis shortly. For now I want to focus on the poem’s subsequent question: “Why were we crucified into sex? / Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves [?]” (10–12). Lawrence often focuses on a kind of suffering involved in the problem of individual sovereignty versus communal experience and intersubjectivity. These themes are well-outlined by critics of his writing and frequently play themselves out through the problematics of sex. Indeed, Richard Ellmann (1990 [1953]) noted early on the connections between images of crucifixion and sexuality in Lawrence’s work: “The metaphor of the cross,” he reminds us, “is one of his most dramatic and successful images, for it implies the sacredness, terror, and pain which were for him essential parts of the sexual experience” (p. 194). What interests me here, however, is the way that Lawrence’s question evokes the most fundamental biological realities about sexual difference. Grosz (2008) helps us recognize those realities when she discusses the role of sexual selection in the elaboration and creativity inherent in organic life forms:
The evolution of life can be seen not only in the increasing specialization and bifurcation or differentiation of life forms from each other, the elaboration and development of profoundly variable morphologies and bodily forms, but, above all, in their becoming-artistic, in their self-transformations, which exceed the bare requirements of existence. Sexual selection, the consequence of sexual difference or morphological bifurcation—one of the earliest upheavals in the evolution of life on earth and undoubtedly the most momentous invention that life has brought forth, the very machinery for guaranteeing the endless generation of morphological and genetic variation, the very mechanism of biological difference itself—is also, by this fact, the opening up of life to the indeterminacy of taste, pleasure, and sensation. Life comes to elaborate itself through making its bodily forms and its archaic territories, pleasing (or annoying), performative, which is to say, intensified through their integration into form and their impact on bodies.
There is much “art” in the natural world, from the moment there is sexual selection, from the moment there are two sexes that attract each other’s interest and taste through visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory sensations.
(pp. 6–7)
There’s a kind of delicious irony embedded in this angle on sexuality, for readers and critics of Lawrence, anyway. Grosz explains that sexual difference is perhaps the prime generator of the excesses and transformations that ultimately establish the becoming-artistic of life itself. In other words, the origins of art at least partly reside in the ways that bodies overcome themselves, create something nonutilitarian, in conjunction with the forces of the earth and the cosmos in the great dance of seduction and mating (not necessarily driven only by reproduction). I think that Lawrence might hate this idea if confronted by it, with its profound yoking of sexual difference and artistic capacity, since Lawrence was often so distraught by the necessities of sex. But perhaps, in a psychoanalytic register, Lawrence’s ambivalence toward sexuality reveals a subterranean recognition on his part of this very linkage that requires a moving beyond the self and a deep connection to the body and animality in order to become-artistic.
When Lawrence asks his next question in the poem, we are ushered into the world of vibration, a world of forces that is central to Grosz’s analysis, particularly via the concerns of Darwin and Deleuze. Lawrence writes: “A far, was-it-audible scream, / Or did it sound on the plasm direct?” (lines 15–16). A scream that is potentially not audible, a sound that bypasses the ear and “sounds” directly on and throughout the body. This is vibration, the vibratory, and emphasizes the primal connection between bodies, rhythm, and cosmic energies.
That Richard Ellmann in 1953 recognized this element of Lawrence’s animal and plant poetics is noteworthy. While Ellmann’s overall sense of the tortoise sequence remains insistently anchored in an unquestionable humanism, he nonetheless clearly senses the importance of the vibratory for Lawrence. Ellmann’s general claim begins to acknowledge Lawrence’s deep sensitivity to animal ontology, though its quick return to human subjectivity as something implicitly nonanimal disappoints: “No poet has a more uncanny sense of what it is like to be, for instance, a copulating tortoise. At their best the poems about tortoises, about elephants, about plants, reveal Lawrence’s attitudes toward men, but without relinquishing their hold on the actual object” (Ellmann 1990 [1953]:195–196). My own readings of Lawrence’s poetry in Stalking the Subject (Rohman 2009) depict a writer much more attentive to animal ontology. Indeed, I would argue that when the animal poems become mere metaphors for human action, they often fail. However, the “passion” with which Lawrence writes about other creatures leads Ellmann to conclude that “nature for Lawrence is pullulating; his landscape, his flowers, his animals have radiant nodes of energy within them, and he sets up an electric circuit between them and himself” (pp. 196–197, my emphasis).
Grosz (2008) notes that for Darwin, the use of rhythm and cadence, sometimes located in the voice, is an essential element of sexual selection. These powers not only seduce, intensify, and excite, but they can also endanger the creature who excels at them. “Nevertheless,” Grosz explains, “it is the erotic, indeed perhaps vibratory, force in all organisms, even those without auditory systems, that seduces, entices, mesmerizes, that sexualizes the body, metabolizes organs, and prepares and solicits it for courtship” (p. 32). Darwin, she explains, insists that “rhythm, vibration, resonance, is enjoyable and intensifying” (p. 32).
It is important to clarify here that Grosz qualifies the emphasis on sexual selection by suggesting that reproduction does not necessarily have to be viewed as the primary telos of these processes. Rather, Grosz (2008) speculates that
[perhaps] sexuality is not so much to be explained in terms of its ends or goals (which in sociobiological terms are assumed to be the [competitive] reproduction of maximum numbers of [surviving] offspring, where sexual selection is ultimately reduced to natural selection) as in terms of its forces, its effects … which are forms of bodily intensification. Vibrations, waves, oscillations, resonances affect living bodies, not for any higher purpose but for pleasure alone.
(p. 33)
Tellingly, Lawrence’s subsequent stanza in the poem elaborates the tortoise vibration in ways that suggest an excessive polyvalence associated with this rhythm: “Worse than the cry of the new-born, / A scream, / A yell, / A shout, / A paean, / A death-agony, / A birth cry, / A submission, / All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn” (lines 17–26). Lawrence seems to tap into the broad and universal instantiations of the vibratory among the living in general in this riff: Birth, death, celebration, pain, vulnerability all emerge from the narrator’s experience of this tortoise’s shout. Citing Alphonso Lingis, Grosz notes that the “first vocalizations in any articulated life are those of a cry: sobbing, gulping, breathing with a more and more intense rhythm. Pain articulates itself in many creatures, even those without vocal apparatus in roars, hisses, screams and squeals. For Lingis, expression is bound up with the rhythmic forces inhabiting and transforming bodies, the pleasures and pains the body comes to articulate” (Grosz 2008:51).
Grosz reminds us of Deleuze’s conceptualization of the refrain (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:232–350) and helps to clarify its function. She writes, “The refrain is a kind of rhythmic regularity that brings a minimum of livable order to a situation in which chaos beckons” (p. 52). In music, for instance, the refrain “wards off chaos by creating a rhythm, tempo, melody that taps chaos by structuring it through the constitution of a territory” (p. 53). It is in her discussion of the Deleuzian refrain and the connection between cosmic and bodily forces that Grosz points to the very life rhythms that Lawrence catalogues in his renaming or rephrasing of the resonances of the tortoise’s shout: “These rhythms of the body—the rhythms of seduction, copulation, birth, death—coupled with those of the earth—seasons, tides, temperatures—are the conditions of the refrain, which encapsulates and abstracts these rhythmic or vibratory forces into a sonorous emblem, a composed rhythm” (p. 55). The impact of this rhythm is most powerfully felt by bodies of the same species, but, as Grosz often points out, these refrains are transmuted and transferred from cosmos to earth, from animal to animal, from animal to human and back, etc. In the case of the poem, then, the refrain of the tortoise resonates through the body of the human narrator, connecting both of them to the “primeval rudiments of life, and the secret” (line 61). Ellmann’s description of the “electric circuit” connecting human and nonhuman in the earlier quotation again seems especially insightful.
One of Grosz’s (2008) comments in her discussion of rhythms and refrains is particularly salient here. She asks, “What else is both labile enough and appealing enough to slip from its material to its most immaterial effects, from the energy of the universe to the muscular oscillations that constitute pleasure and pain in living things? What else enables the body itself, the internal arrangement of its organs and their hollows, to resonate and to become instruments of sonorous expression?” (p. 55). Thus, when Lawrence talks of the “male soul’s membrane / Torn with a shriek half music, half horror” (lines 31–32), we recognize the implicit reference to a Deleuzian refrain.
Moreover, in the poetic genre, rhythm itself is embedded in the communication of content. Lawrence repeats the tups, the jerks, the screams of the tortoise in coition, just as he includes variations of the refrain of the reptile’s shout as they appear in other living organisms. Here is Lawrence’s renaming and rephrasing that connects the poem most specifically to the Deleuzian refrain. A very long stanza begins with the opening line “I remember, when I was a boy, / I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in / the mouth of an up-starting snake” (lines 69–72). The narrator goes on to catalogue “hearing a wild goose out of the throat / of night,” “the scream of a rabbit,” “the heifer in her heat, blorting and / blorting,” and “a woman in / labour, something like an owl whooing, / … The first wail of an infant, / And my mother singing to herself / And the first tenor singing of the passionate / throat of a young collier” (lines 75–97 passim) among several other vibrations. The refrain of the tortoise’s shout is connected to vocalizations that cross species lines and represent the universal rhythms of life—and especially the bringing forth of life in the birthing process—that we have already mentioned as the conditions of the refrain.
This long passage, which is situated near the center of the poem, is especially crucial for our reading of the poem in its posthumanist context. The connections that Lawrence makes here are not to be overlooked. The scream of a rabbit is collocated with the cries of the woman in labor, yes, but, perhaps even more strikingly, these vibrations are coterminous not only with the maternal singing voice but even with the young tenor’s voice. These final connections to human song, to human aesthetics, make Grosz’s point about the becoming-artistic of the vibratory quite clear. For Lawrence, all of these practices are fundamentally about life rhythm, about the cosmic forces in which all creatures, human and nonhuman, participate.
What is more, each of these comparisons highlights living beings at extremity, which is importantly connected to Grosz’s understanding of excess and intensity. After the catalogue of refrains, Lawrence returns to the tortoise: “And more than all these, / And less than all these, / This last, / Strange, faint coition yell / Of the male tortoise at extremity, / Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life” (lines 101–107, my emphasis). It goes without saying that the organism is intensified through sexuality. Moreover, the biological fact of the male tortoise’s coition scream brilliantly underscores this intensification. As we noted at the beginning of the essay, and as Peter Young documents, tortoises are mute except for the male’s cries during mating. We might imagine a life of continual muteness only to be broken in this most acute and physically radical circumstance.
Grosz also reminds us that “art is where intensity is most at home” (2008:76). “Perhaps,” she continues, “we can understand matter in art as matter at its most dilated, matter as it most closely approximates mind, diastole, or proliferation rather than systole and compression and where becoming is most directly in force” (p. 76). We see the proliferation of matter on some level through the voice’s expressing bodily intensity in the poem. And, of course, that bodily intensity is sexual here. More generally, the extreme cry tends to underscore the idea that it is the excesses of evolution, the pressing beyond oneself and beyond the mundane routines of the body that manifests aesthetic practice.
Grosz continues to link the sexual and the artistic in her final chapter where she discusses aboriginal Australian art. Within that discussion she notes that “qualities and territory coexist, and thus both are the condition for sexual selection and for art making—or perhaps for the art of sexual selection and equally the sexuality of art production. It is this excess, of both harnessable forces and of unleashed qualities, that enables both art and sex to erupt, at the same evolutionary moment, as a glorification of intensity, as the production and elaboration of intensity for its own sake” (p. 102). Lawrence’s poem seems to thematize this very eruption, since he emphasizes, in the poem’s final considerations, the opening that sexuality both requires and results in: “Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our / deep silence / Tearing a cry from us. / Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the / deeps, calling, calling for the complement, / Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, / having found” (lines 113–117).
Referencing the Platonic myth that gender breaks some originary unity into separate beings who search for their “other half,” Lawrence outlines a problem of “opening” and woundedness that critics have recognized throughout his oeuvre. Ellmann called Lawrence a “healer” who used his writing to dress personal and universal wounds (1990 [1953]:186). Kyoko Kondo (2003) has also written about the central role of the metaphor of opening in Women in Love and notes that Gerald in that novel experiences opening as a wound. We recognize that the ancient myth essentializes gender to some degree, but it nonetheless resonates with Grosz’s claims about intensity, excess, sexuality, and art. Here the refrain—the singing, calling, and answering—acts as a signal to the mate, to the other, just as Grosz indicates. Lawrence ends the poem by emphasizing sexuality as the separation and recoordination of bodies: “That which is whole, torn asunder, / That which is in part, finding its whole again through the / universe” (lines 122–124).
In these final moments of Lawrence’s text the link between past, present, and future poignantly emerges. If we had to sum up, we might say that the “far-off” and evolutionarily prior cry of the tortoise vibrates through the speaker in an intensified present that enlivens the speaker’s recognition of the shared contingency of the living and, at the same time, illuminates the future processes of becoming in that contingency. We should note the intensely cosmic nature of the final image: One doesn’t find one’s complement only in the “other” here, whether human or tortoise. Indeed, one finds one’s complement in the “universe,” perhaps as that universe or cosmos is manifested in the creaturely embodiment of the other. And, in this particular poem, the creaturely is manifested in the rhythms, the vibrations of life itself becoming artistic. Grosz gives us a sense of this modality when she writes, “Art is not simply the expression of an animal past, a prehistorical allegiance with the evolutionary forces that make one; it is not memorialization, the celebration of a shared past, but above all the transformation of the materials from the past into resources for the future” (2008:103).
It seems fitting to end this discussion by addressing the poem itself as an affective becoming that bridges human and animal intensity through a shared vibratory force akin to the voice. Again taking her cue from Deleuze, Grosz concludes that affects are “man’s becoming-other” (p. 77). By this she means that affects allow the human to “overcome” itself or move outside of itself through “the creation of zones of proximity between the human and those animal and microscopic/cosmic becomings the human can pass through. Affects signal that border between the human and the animal from which it has come” (p. 77). The rhythm of poetics might provide the most apt literary genre for the shared vibratory experience between human and animal minds, bodies, and being in general to be expressed. In Lawrence’s poem it is the refrain of the animal voice linked to or becoming the refrain of the human poetic voice that demonstrates in full force the voice of the living. This generalized vibratory power connects the narrator to the tortoise through a deep and almost seamless vibration by the poem’s end. As is often the case for Lawrence, his work refuses to cordon off the mind from the rest of the corpus, and he delves into the bodiliness and embeddedness not of the human or animal but of the living in general. Thus “Tortoise Shout” performs, in a sense, the interpenetration of cosmic intensities in which all creatures participate.
References
Becket, F. 1997. D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. New York: St. Martin’s.
Deleuze G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre nia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ellmann, R. 1990 [1953]. “Lawrence and His Demon.” In A. Banerjee, ed., D. H. Law rence’s Poetry: Demon Liberated, pp. 186–199. London: Macmillan.
——. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kondo, K. 2003. “Metaphor in Women in Love.” In K. Cushman and E. Ingersoll, eds., D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, pp. 168–182. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Rohman, C. 2009. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press.
Young, P. 2003. Tortoise. London: Reaktion.
Tortoise Shout
D. H. LAWRENCE
| I thought he was dumb, | |
| I said he was dumb, | |
| Yet I’ve heard him cry. | |
| | |
| First faint scream, | |
| Out of life’s unfathomable dawn, | 5 |
| Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon’s dawning rim, | |
| Far, far off, far scream. | |
| | |
| Tortoise in extremis. | |
| | |
| Why were we crucified into sex? | |
| Why were we not left rounded off, and finished | 10 |
| in ourselves, | |
| As we began, | |
| As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? | |
| | |
| A far, was-it-audible scream, | 15 |
| Or did it sound on the plasm direct? | |
| | |
| Worse than the cry of the new-born, | |
| A scream, | |
| A yell, | |
| A shout, | 20 |
| A pæan, | |
| A death-agony, | |
| A birth-cry, | |
| A submission, | |
| All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. | 25 |
| | |
| War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, | |
| Why was the veil torn? | |
| The silken shriek of the soul’s torn membrane? | 30 |
| The male soul’s membrane | |
| Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. | |
| | |
| Crucifixion. | |
| Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, | 35 |
| Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching | |
| out of the shell | |
| In tortoise-nakedness, | |
| Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, | 40 |
| And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, | |
| Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension | |
| Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! | 45 |
| Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck | |
| And giving that fragile yell, that scream, | 50 |
| Super-audible, | |
| From his pink, cleft, old-man’s mouth, | |
| Giving up the ghost, | |
| Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. | |
| | |
| His scream, and his moment’s subsidence, | |
| | |
| The moment of eternal silence, | 55 |
| Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once | |
| The inexpressible faint yell— | |
| And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back | 60 |
| To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. | |
| | |
| So he tups, and screams | |
| Time after time that frail, torn scream | |
| After each jerk, the longish interval, | |
| The tortoise eternity, | 65 |
| Agelong, reptilian persistence, | |
| Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. | |
| | |
| I remember, when I was a boy, | |
| I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught | 70 |
| with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; | |
| I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break | |
| into sound in the spring; | |
| I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night | 75 |
| Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; | |
| I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale’s piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; | 80 |
| | |
| I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; | |
| I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; | 85 |
| | |
| I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; | |
| I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning | |
| And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, | 90 |
| And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, | |
| The first wail of an infant, | |
| And my mother singing to herself, | 95 |
| And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, | |
| The first elements of foreign speech | 100 |
| On wild dark lips. | |
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| And more than all these, | |
| And less than all these, | |
| This last, | |
| Strange, faint coition yell | |
| Of the male tortoise at extremity, | 105 |
| Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest | |
| far-off horizon of life. | |
| | |
| The cross, | |
| The wheel on which our silence first is broken, | |
| Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence | 110 |
| Tearing a cry from us. | |
| | |
| Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, | 115 |
| Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. | |
| | |
| Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, | |
| The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, | 120 |
| That which is whole, torn asunder, | |
| That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe. | |
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