Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness: Incorporating the Work of Community or Assembling a Multitude?

It is in relation to the tubercular discursive network whose contours the previous chapter explores that I would like to return to Lawrence’s literary corpus. Especially pertinent from the preceding discussion is the double articulation to which life is subject. On the one hand, the medicalscientific discourses constellated around the tubercular body function to paper over or domesticate a “bare life” that cannot be incorporated into schemas of bodily significance, and on the other they are profoundly marked by a persistent vitalism that privileges an ineffable life force. Having argued that the working over of bare life functions in the service of an organic mode of community, and that the potential for the unworking of that communitarian form offered by a vitalistic impulse is contained by the practices and conceptual framework of the sanatorium and the open-air cure, this chapter asks to what extent Lawrence’s articulation of corporeal and communal economies (and their interrelationship) are shaped by the discursive relays of the bioscientific enterprise his texts engage. To what degree is his incorporation of community mediated by the structures made available by bioscientific culture, and to what degree do his texts produce discursive connections unrealized in the medical scientific field narrowly construed—connections possibly less amenable to the domestication of bare life? In order to engage these questions we will need initially to focus on the issue of vitalism in Lawrence’s work.