My past few posts have concerned Death and Freud's theories regarding the Death Instinct or Death Wish that highlights a physiological compulsion to negate all stimulus to ultimately return to an inorganic state. As a result, the characters in DHLawrence's Women in Love who seem to demonstrate this tendency towards death also present questions regarding the meaning of life but in most cases fail to really define what life has to offer as they are preoccupied with death. In the following passage, Gerald Crich lends his assistance. He is a colliery manager and injects the novel with some fantastic writings on industry and modernisation. First, his fundamental views on life:
His vision had suddenly crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered. Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry, was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest was by-play.-p.193
Contextualise with those other ruminations:
Between the Desire and the Spasm The Death Instinct, Love and Tennyson Death and The Afterlife
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