로렌스와 메를로 뽕띠의 세잔론

Abstract

This paper aims to explore some similarities between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and D.H. Lawrence in terms of their evaluation of historical achievements of Paul Cézanne. Merleau-Ponty holds the basic view that human perception arises from the interaction between the human body and the object, not from the Cartesian cogito. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” he also points out that Cézanne is faithful to the phenomenon itself and takes the actual perceptual point of view. Merleau-Ponty sees reality as something active and inexhaustible, and argues that Cézanne made his lifelong struggle to grasp and represent reality as it is. Similarly, Lawrence says that Cézanne’s apple realizes the “appleyness” because it is presented just like it “really exists” breaking away from scientist, objectivist, or anthropocentric assumptions of the apple. Lawrence and Merleau-Ponty also have something in common in that they emphasize that human body inextricably intervenes in the act of perception. Nevertheless, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Lawrence relatively devalues the achievement of Cézanne’s later watercolor paintings, and this is because Lawrence is mainly committed to criticizing idealism in “The Introduction to These Paintings.” While Merleau-Ponty’s arguments are fundamentally based on the theoretical researches of the “primordial perception,” Lawrence directly goes into the kernel of Cézanne as a man and painter, and makes us keenly feel his struggle and appreciate the rarity of his achievement. In spite of these differences, Lawrence’s view that imagination is basically “physical and intuitive perception,” obviously has a significant affinity with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach which demands a return to “living experience.”