I wrote a story of the Resurrection, where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can’t stand the old crowd any more—so cuts out—and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven. (Letters VI 50)

3Given Lawrence’s religious background which included daily readings of the Bible sustained by biblical debates and other forms of appropriation such as games (see Bricout 17-19), it is significant that this very theological break should be conveyed along the fault lines between the biblical text and his alternative narrative. “The Man Who Died” does not merely allude to the biblical text or quote it. Lawrence’s aesthetic project actually generates narrative, linguistic and epistemological frictions between texts since it consists in capitalizing on textual relational dynamics to depict his personal vision of the resurrection. Although intertextual theories differ slightly, they concur with Julia Kristeva’s claim that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another text” (66) and aim to assert the “literariness” or the “literarity” of a text, defined as what marks out a given work as a literary work (Genette 9). Following Roland Barthes, for whom the text is no longer an end product but rather a space where meaning is produced thanks to what he calls “the work of the text” (38), this discussion is interested in the convergent and divergent frictions between texts. Borrowing from geological semantics, I call such textual dynamics “textual tectonics” to discuss the highly significant tensions maintained between Lawrence’s narrative and the Bible. The geological theory of tectonic plates that converge and diverge on earth provides, indeed, an appropriate critical trope to examine Lawrence’s rewriting of the account of the resurrection since, as will be shown, geological details play into the unfolding of the story literally as well as symbolically. The trope is all the more compelling as earthquakes feature prominently at key moments in the Bible to express divine anger, universal judgment, death, and resurrection (see Allison et al. 158-60). For instance, in the New Testament, an earthquake occurs when Christ, dying, “yield[s] up the ghost” (Matthew XXVII, 51–53) and also, three days later, when the stone sealing his grave rolls away (Matthew XXVIII, 2).

4First, the following discussion argues that Lawrence’s narrative operates along the fault-lines produced by textual tensions in order to depict the corporeality of the resurrection to the flesh that Lawrence resolutely emphasizes in his works. This alternative version of Jesus’s fate is also the focus of a poem called “The Risen Lord” and of a painting of a pietà titled “Resurrection” where Lawrence portrayed himself as Christ (Hyde 210). Then, an examination of the narrative’s iconoclastic borrowings from the Egyptian myth of the dismemberment of Osiris, as well as from other esoteric beliefs, will highlight the syncretic quality of Lawrence’s writing, a feature that is also at the heart of the novel The Plumed Serpent about the revived worship of Aztec gods (see Bricout 189-92). Finally, an exploration of generic and genetic tensions in “The Man Who Died” will show how the iconoclastic and linguistic disruptions embedded in the narrative release the mythopoetic potentialities of the short story as genre.

Breaks

5The frictions between the biblical text and Lawrence’s modernist narrative are mainly produced by a profound shift in focalization. Indeed, the four gospels all give an account of the resurrection according to witnesses on the outside of the tomb where Jesus’s body has been laid. The Gospel according to Matthew reads:

In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. (Matthew XXVIII, 1-2)

6In “The Man Who Died,” focalization lies on the Christ-like figure inside the tomb. When the man wakes and gradually pulls off the bandages covering him, an earthquake takes place, “there was a crash and a wave of light” (125), as in Matthew’s account. Tension arises between the miraculous quality of the resurrection and the realistic geological phenomenon that cracks up the rock of the tomb. Yet, tectonic forces are also astutely embedded in Lawrence’s text in the unexpected frictions within language that challenge the conventional Christian narrative. Indeed, language is disrupted as the awakening man perceives “a pale chink . . . prising open the pure dark,” followed by more “chinks of light” (“Man Who Died” 125). In a scene so deeply grounded in the material aspects of the biblical story, the hypallagic association of rock and light definitely allows for a parallel to be drawn with body and life. Moreover, zoomorphism, in “the animal onrush of light,” and personification, in the “piercing keenness of daybreak’s sharp breath” (125), that both render the splitting of the rocks in the tomb, blur boundaries that the awakening mind is trying to redefine, having come back from “the place where even memory is stone dead” (125). Thus, the materiality of rocks, chinks, cracks, and slits, described throughout “The Man Who Died,” and in particular in the scene in the tomb, emphasizes the corporeality of the resurrection to the flesh.

7Depictions of geological features of the rocky cavity of the tomb alternate with those of bodily sensations which the man who died perceives at first confusedly, as other linguistic disruptions highlight. For instance, in “Bandages and linen and perfume fell away” (125), the unexpected association of cloth (bandages, linen) and fragrance (perfume) with the same verb (fell) combines elements from different fields. Moreover, awakening mental faculties are depicted thanks to hypallages when the man moves with the caution of “the bitterly wounded,” feeling “pain like utterly bodily disillusion” (125). Thus, language is renewed to capture the ineffable experience of resurrection. Frictions, then, are multidirectional; they occur between the biblical text and Lawrence’s, between the Christian doctrine of the resurrection and an alternative belief in physical rebirth, and they operate within Lawrence’s narrative when words clash to convey a moving scene of a Christ-like figure awakening “from a long sleep in which he was tied up” (124), a double-pronged reference to the mortuary bandages and to the mission the man was bound to as the redeemer of humanity.

8The break from the binding mission, which is explicitly mentioned in the narrative, is symbolically evoked thanks to the titular escaped cock, itself tethered to a post. The parallel with the cock is said to result from a scene Lawrence witnessed just before writing the novella. Visiting Volterra in Italy on Palm Sunday 1927, he saw a toy white rooster escaping from an egg in a shop window. His travel companion, Earl Brewster, recalled in his memoirs, “I remarked that it suggested a title—‘The Escaped Cock’—a story of the Resurrection” (123). Arguably linking the toy rooster in the shop window and his narrative, Lawrence later signed a copy of the completed book “To Earl this story, that began in Volterra, when we were there together” (Brewster 124). In Christian tradition, the cock plays a noteworthy role during Jesus’s arrest. Indeed, Jesus prophesied that one of his disciples, named Peter, would deny him three times before the cock crowed (John XIII, 38). Pressing this point, James Cowan, in his pioneering study of religious symbolism in Lawrence’s works, notes how the Christian story is both retained and imaginatively transformed, writing, “The gamecock is a fitting structural device; it heralds both Jesus’s death and his rebirth, both Peter’s denial of knowing him (John XVIII, 15-27) and his own affirmation through self-knowledge” (242). I would add that, beyond its symbolic value, in “The Man Who Died,” the gamecock contributes structurally to the narrative shift from the farmyard to the tomb. Indeed, having managed to snap the string that holds it back, the rooster “crowed a loud and splitting crow. So loud it woke the peasant” (“Man Who Died” 124; emphasis added). The text itself is literarily split at this point as the next paragraph turns to the scene in the tomb: “At the same time, at the same hour before dawn, on the same morning, a man awoke from a long sleep” (124). Anaphora, “At the same,” coupled with synonymous repetition, “time,” “hour,” “morning,” registers both simultaneity and novelty, the ternary rhythm of the anaphora echoing the number of times Peter denied Christ before the cock crowed according to the biblical story. Of course, the narrative break between the scene in the farmyard and the one in the tomb is heralded in the clash between the competing titles of the story. A month before his death, Lawrence had agreed to the alternative title “The Man Who Died,” which was only used later for posthumous editions (Lawrence, Virgin xli).

Dismemberment

10Part One of “The Escaped Cock,” as the story was called then, was published in the American magazine The Forum in February 1928, “rousing a violent outburst of contrary opinions” according to its editor (Lawrence, Virgin xlviii-xlix). Lawrence reacted to some of the angry letters that the magazine had forwarded to him, punning jocosely, “Now I know I’ve committed the unpardonable sin, I feel all right. I always was so afraid I might be saved: like ten dollars in the bank. . . . Vive le gai coq, et le coq gai!” (Letters VI 370).

11By that time, Lawrence had already started writing what he described as “the phallic second half I always intended to add to it” (Letters VI 326). In Part Two of “The Escaped Cock,” the frictions created between the biblical text and Lawrence’s modernist narrative are further amplified by disruptive shifts which pertain to iconoclasm and syncretism when the Christian doctrine and the Egyptian myth of Osiris, together with other esoteric beliefs in bodily centers of energy, are conflated. Thanks to iconoclasm, from the Greek eikōn, icon, figure, and kláō, to break, Lawrence expresses his move away from traditional Christian beliefs to depict sexual epiphany.

12In the Egyptian myth, the body of the murdered Osiris is dismembered, and his wife, Isis, sets out, according to “The Man Who Died,” “looking for the fragments of the dead Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in fragments over the wide world” (143). As evidenced by John Vickery in The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Lawrence picks up material from James Frazer’s chapter “Killing the God” which foregrounds commonalities between ideas in primitive religions and the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, with a focus on the redeeming role of woman (see Vickery 280-325). Indeed, as Philip Marcus also notes in his article “Lawrence, Yeats, and ‘the Resurrection,’” in a narrative now extended to novella length, the resurrection is recast “as if Christ had stepped from the New Testament into the world of The Golden Bough” (229). Interestingly, Lawrence had already combined the two accounts when he described his state of mind in a letter a year into the First World War:

My heart is smashed into a thousand fragments, and I shall never have the energy to collect the bits—like Osiris—or Isis. . . . All these Gethsemane Calvary and Sepulchre stages must be over now: there must be a resurrection—resurrection: a resurrection with sound hands and feet and a whole body and a new soul. (Letters II 454)

13On meeting the eponymous “man who died,” the priestess of Isis identifies him as the dismembered god. Thematically pervasive in Part Two, the geological features of the peninsula where her temple is located, its cavities, gullies, cracks, hollows, shingles on the shore, and even smooth stones in a pool, contrast with the bleak tomb and the stone that was rolled away in the first part. The discrepancy paves the way for the iconoclastic shift from Christian doctrine to Egyptian myth. Cowan finds in the new scenery “carefully chosen phallic symbols (the peninsula, the sun, the trees...)” and “yonic symbols (the temple, the two bays, the sea)” (247). The yonic symbol is actually reworked into a small cave in which the man shelters, finding protection and warmth there, in stark opposition with the cold rocky cavity of the tomb. Lawrence’s text reads: “The cave was suddenly full, and a dwelling-place” (154). The womb-like cave heralds rebirth and the looming sexual epiphany that the man is about to experience. Thus, not only has the chasm between the biblical text and Lawrence’s widened, other fault-lines are appearing between the two parts of the novella in which the materiality of appealing landscape preludes the restoration of the bodily centers of energy through touch.

14Using tectonic semantics in her seminal study of biblical typology in Lawrence’s novella, Virginia Hyde comments: “tactile contact . . . must dispel the fearful aftershock of near death caused by the violent touch of crucifixion” (220; emphasis added). Thanks to her healing touch, when she attends to the man’s wounds, the priestess of Isis reverses the theme Noli me Tangere which runs through the novella. At first, Lawrence’s narrative describes how the man shrinks away from their coming together as “his flesh was still woven with pain and the wild commandment: Noli me tangere! Touch me not! Oh, don’t touch me!” (150), a synonymous repetition moving from the biblical quote in Latin (John XX, 17) to a more intimate phrasing which foregrounds the growing bodily proximity of the characters and their sexual epiphany. The five wounds of the Christ-like character are ritualistically healed, the priestess filling her palms with oil and anointing them to stimulate the bodily centers of energy according to esoteric beliefs. Friction now heals since anointing the wounds ritualistically typifies the salutary restoration of the dismembered body, in conformity with the Egyptian myth. Again, linguistic disruptions convey an ineffable experience, by blurring boundaries. Indeed, in the novella, an extended metaphor related to the wounded body begging to be healed renews language to restore the mystery of fulfillment in the flesh omitted in the resurrection doctrine. The metaphor depicts the man undergoing ritualistic healing when the priestess of Isis chafes his stigmata-like wounds, attending finally to

the scar in the soft flesh of the socket of his side, a scar deep and like an eye sore with endless weeping. . . . And he felt his wounds crying aloud, and deep places of the body howling again. . . . And he listened to the faint, ceaseless wail distress of his wounds. . . . But the wail was growing dim, more dim...And the wailing died out altogether. (“Man Who Died” 158-59)

16As Hyde highlights, according to Lawrence, the man is to experience a new kind of death induced by his sexual encounter with the priestess (213). In the scenes following the description of the wounds being healed, the semantics of tectonics and rocks are used again to glorify sexual potency, as in “The shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so he wondered if it were another sort of death. But full of magnificence” (“Man Who Died” 159). Revising Christ’s words to Peter, “upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew XVI, 18), during the sexual experience, the man cries out “‘On this rock I build my life!’—The deep-folded penetrable rock of the living woman!” (“Man Who Died” 159). Ultimately, the man’s sexual awakening is depicted in paratactic sentences, exclamations and repetitions which render the build-up of climactic ideological and linguistic tensions that merge in the blasphemous pun “I am risen!” (159). Thus, the syncretic encounter of Christian, Egyptian and esoteric traditions turns the priestess into the man’s “soft white rock of life” (159), the oxymoronic “soft rock” further “altering the rock imagery relating traditionally to Christ” (Hyde 220), since the life-giver is the woman and not the Christ-like figure as in biblical tradition.

17Creating tensions with the biblical story, geological semantics pervade, then, Lawrence’s text to invert the natural and the miraculous when the miracle of the resurrection is depicted only through natural phenomena, whereas the bodily encounter with the priestess celebrates the sacred mystery of sexual fulfillment. In this way, the linguistic and narrative disruptions embed the redemptive power of writing in the very materiality of the text.

Generic and Genetic Fault-Lines

18As much as the story emphasizes the corporeality of resurrection, it also attracts our attention to its own materiality. After the first part had been published in The Forum, the narrative developed into novella length when, fourteen months later, Lawrence added a “phallic second half.” Writing to his agent on 15 March 1928, Lawrence declared he would write a ten thousand-word “thing,” specifying that “it is a length I like and I hate having to fit magazines” (Letters VI 326). Ironically however, the material integrity of the text was somewhat compromised since an editorial decision removed crude terms relating to genitals (see Wright 217) and the journal The Forum had the title of the novella changed to “Resurrection,” on its front cover, because of the lewd phallic pun in the original one (Lawrence, Virgin liv). The completed story was first published in a stand-alone volume of ninety-six pages in September 1929. So, because of its liminal position along the fault-lines of fictional forms, “The Man Who Died” is often said to resist generic categorization and has been subsequently published in collections either with other novellas or with short stories, what Bruno Montfort calls a “polytextual publication context” (158). Such resistance to generic categorizations contributes to the debate on the definition of the short story and the novella taken up by Graham Good: “Categories based purely on length,” he writes, “are bound to be arbitrary; there is no magic number of words which constitutes the minimum for a novel or the maximum for a short story, and there are always borderline cases” (147).

19Further complicating generic categorization, “The Man Who Died” has been called a fable, an allegory, and a modern parable, the latter term pointing to its biblical resonances (Hyde 24). In her arresting study of Lawrence’s successive versions and drafts of the story, Janice J. Harris rightly argues that the move from the peasants’ crowing cock to the awakening of the Christ-like figure follows “the principle of sequence implying simile. . . . A potentially resplendent figure himself, Christ too belonged to the peasants. He too has been tied up. He too has just escaped. In combination with the subject, this neat parallelism suggests that we have before us a fable” (293). The fact that the parallelism can be found in all earlier versions of the first part of the story, now available in the Cambridge edition, indicates that Lawrence intended to pen his alternative vision of the resurrection in the fabular mode, a mode which allows for the mythopoetic potentialities of writing to be released.

21Lawrence’s revisions, then, importantly restructure the tensions between the two parts of the narrative which thereby gains in intensity. In this way, the brevity of the first part of “The Man Who Died” gives prominence to the corporeality of the concept of redemption while the second poignantly renders its achievement. In the passage where the man leaves the peasants’ home, the Forum version expresses the man’s desire to be alone thanks to the isolated image of an iris, the flower standing alone and still “within the Father” (Lawrence, Virgin 212). The flowery image and the Christian reference to “the Father” have been deleted in the final version which focuses more on resonances already embedded in the story so as to turn material detail into symbol. The final text has the man say to himself, “I am alone within my own skin, which is the walls of all my domain” (“Man Who Died” 137). Walls, featuring in the first pages of the story, with the rocky walls of the tomb and the high walls of the farmyard, enclose beings striving to break free, as the rooster which learns to “give shrill answers to the crowing of other cocks, beyond the wall, in a world he knew nothing of” (123). The comparison between the skin and the wall, towards the end of the first part, stresses, by contrast, the fullness of being that the man who died believes he has found on renouncing the mission to which he was bound as a Christ-like figure. By choosing to remain alone, at the end of Part One, he experiences to the full the biblical phrase Noli me tangere, as he strives to avoid contact with other human beings. Revisions, therefore, link up passages of the narrative more explicitly with each other, creating significant tensions as they converge and diverge. Paradoxically, while the story expands in length, its revisions, by restructuring internal tensions, capitalize on intensity and economy, both belonging to short story poetics. Therefore, despite the generic ambiguity of “The Man Who Died,” the short story as genre deserves consideration, when discussing the work, because of the way what I have called textual tectonics produce frictions and climactic tensions. What is of interest here is that the economy of the genre encapsulates the intensity of the epiphanic experiences while linguistic disruptions, together with intertextual frictions, subtly condense their complexity and contribute to renew language in order to release the mythopoetic potentialities of writing.

22Tellingly, the modernist open-ending of the narrative calls for retrospective attention to the conclusion of the first part of the story where the man travelled the world alone. His life is now threatened by the mother of the priestess who disapproves of him, so he sails away after having told the priestess, who is expecting his child, that he will come back. It has been argued that the new turn in the plot, which introduces such mundane concerns, undermines the story’s dynamics in the way that they fail to convey a lack of burden, and weakens the sense of fulfilment described in the previous epiphanic paragraphs. The man, reborn, looks forward to a secular life of freedom, but he may now face, as George Panichas puts it, “the tyranny of material existence” for “[Lawrence’s] Christ is a Risen Lord—but one who ultimately becomes, or is destined to become, a slave to the world of sense” (65). A focus on what I have called textual tectonics can be helpful to show how the open-ending plays into the story’s tensions. Intertextual frictions with the biblical account certainly subside since the closing sentences are divested of any Christian allusions. Such allusions are now supplanted by esoteric images relating to cosmic energy, as in “the gold and flowing serpent… coiling up again, to sleep at the root of my tree” (“Man Who Died” 163). The semantics of flow and water dominate in the final paragraph and rocks are literal again; as geological features of the landscape, they offer the man a hiding place from which he overhears plans to kill him, before the sound of oars against the rocks of the shore warn him of an approaching boat. Thanks to the modernist open-ending, intertextual and internal tensions come to breaking point, then, as the character, sailing away, heads for his new life beyond the limits of the narrative.

23Because his narratives offer alternatives to Christian doctrines, Lawrence was also called a “tablet-breaker,” a phrase one of his early literary critics, Eugene Goodheart, borrowed from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra to describe the modernist writer (5). In “The Man Who Died,” Lawrence’s truly iconoclastic project capitalizes on the fault-lines between the biblical text and his own to express his theological and epistemological stance. His mythopoetic mode of writing creates multi-directional tensions that defy the linearity of the reading experience itself, since the readers are compelled to compare texts and different parts of the narrative. The semantics of rocks and crevices, discussed here in relation to textual dynamics, play into the structural and metaphorical tensions of the narrative as it unfolds, while genetic tensions between versions blur generic categories, building a modernist text. Thus, textual tectonics urge Lawrence’s readers to consider alternatives to status quo, in other words, to push back the stone of doctrine.