Lady Chatterley’s Lover: more a philosophical treatise than a “dirty book”

In the second half of the 1920s D H Lawrence was dying, and he had things to say and demonstrate before death shut him up. He poured those messages into Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is widely known as a “dirty book” but in reality is closer to a philosophical treatise. The book has many themes, but if I pick out one sentence from the book that contains its most important message, it is this: “Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind.” Lawrence was writing nearly a decade after the end of First World War and around the time of the short-lived General Strike if 1926. He begins the book with this passage: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble…