Sex Isn't Everything (But It Can be Anything): The Symbolic Function of Extremity in Modernism

Abstract

The extremity in modernism signals indeterminate symbolic meanings. Now that the explicit sex and other forms of extremity that modernists used are no longer shocking, however, their symbolic function must be reconstructed. As Foucault, Freud, and Kandinsky argue, transgressive symbols evoke the immanence of non-empirical experience in empirical reality. Thus modernist extremity provides secular alternatives to materialism by symbolizing non-empirical experience that is not supernatural, not subjective, and not grounded in a particular belief. D. H. Lawrence's use of sex illustrates the symbolic indeterminacy of extremity. Although some critics argue that he regards sex as a new religion, Lawrence does not grant sex the stability of a creed or the efficacy of a ritual. In The Rainbow sex is an indeterminate symbol that accumulates contradictory meanings ranging from transcendence to degradation. By daring to write about the unspeakable, Lawrence and other modernists also represent the unsayable.