Gesamtkunstwerk

Lawrence’s engagement with a remarkable range of arts is demonstrated throughout this Companion; this chapter considers the extent to which he brought aspects of these various arts into play within single artworks, notably in Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent. The Gesamtkunstwerk (or total artwork) is usually associated with Wagner, whose influence disseminated through Nietzsche and the German Expressionists into a modernism that sought to engage all the senses at once. Yet, despite its totalising potential, the Gesamtkunstwerk consists of separate artistic media that struggle for coherence or supremacy, and thus it also works to fragment and loosen form, as illustrated by Lawrence’s most experimental works of the 1920s. This chapter considers Lawrence in the context of his German contemporaries ‒ Brecht, Kandinsky, Mann and Schoenberg ‒ and how the paradoxes inherent in the totalising and non-totalising potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk influenced his ambivalent attitudes to society as a form of brotherhood.