D.H. Lawrence's "Dark Page": narrative primitivism in 'Women in Love' and 'The Plumed Serpent.' - English author

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Brett Neilson

Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her. How could one write on a page so profoundly black?

- The Plumed Serpent (51)

According to Tzvetan Todorov, there is no such thing as "primitive narrative": "[n] o narrative is natural; a choice and construction will always preside over its appearance; narrative is a discourse, not a series of events" (55). This is narratology's most basic premise, but it has a special relevance for my topic in this paper - that is, how modernist attempts to represent the primitive in narrative disable the critique of Western modernity that so often accompanies them. Focusing on two texts from D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent, I argue that they deploy a strategy that I call "narrative primitivism." By this I mean that they imagine the primitive as a nonnarratable quality, which returns to destabilize their progressive time schemes. By exploring the complicity of these narrative techniques with atemporal/ahistorical notions of the primitive, I contrast Lawrence's critique of the Enlightenment values of instrumentality and reason with recent theories of postcoloniality, defined loosely as the "failure of decolonization."(1) In particular, I compare Lawrence's ideas about nationalism, race, and gender to the present-day theories of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, arguing that he cannot imagine a form of hybridity that articulates difference outside a dynastic class hierarchy. Ultimately, Lawrence's critique of modernity refashions the ethnocentric myth of cultural progression as a logic of restitution, leaving undisturbed the temporal model that makes it possible to understand the primitive as a fiction of lost origins.

The primitive is a disputed category, and its use to describe traditional cultures such as those of precolonial Mexico is highly doubtful. Anthropologists have avoided its implications of temporal priority by preferring the word archaic, but Lawrence uses the term to describe much more than indigenous and non-Western cultures. In her Gone Primitive, Mariana Torgovnick has charted his use of the word, cataloging the various states and entities it signifies throughout his novels (159). Including "workingclass men," "phallic power," and "natural harmony (attunement with the sun)," her list is sufficiently heterogeneous to show that the Lawrentian primitive furnishes no consistent political or anthropological thematic. Yet she finds Lawrence's divergent attitudes toward the idea to display a fundamental shift in his work, from a feminine, degenerative primitive in Women in Love (a feature the book shares with Conrad's Heart of Darkness) to a masculine, regenerative version in The Plumed Serpent. This regendering of the primitive is undoubtedly a feature of Lawrence's ouevre, but, as the transformation itself suggests, such identifications are never internally stable. Building on Torgovnick's argument, I want to show that this negotiability of gender in the Lawrentian primitive unsettles the heterosexual logic by which identification and desire are mutually exclusive. For Lawrence, the primitive is a dense site of significations that allows the coexistence of hetero- and homosexual modes of desire. Thus, the novels that grapple with this theme frequently contain episodes that interrogate their own adherence to a narrative logic empowered by heterosexual relations of displacement and rivalry.

Women in Love is a case in point. Consider the discussion that follows the famous man-to-man tussle in the chapter entitled "Gladiatorial." Hoping to evade the "clutching" bonds of Ursula and accede to an impersonal, nongenital state of union with Gerald, Birkin declares "Life has all kinds of things. . . . There isn't only one road" (276). The trope implies the possibility of an escape from the naturalized imperative of heterosexual commitment that Lawrence, in a contemporaneous essay, associates with an "endless continuing in the same sort, endless traveling in one direction" ("Love" 25). But the novel's end proves otherwise. Gerald dies amid an alpine blizzard, and Birkin remains subject to the "endless traveling" of heterosexual commitment. As Ursula says, his ideal of "eternal union with a man" is a "theory" (481), and as such it expresses only dissatisfaction with the unidirectionality of "love," whether hetero- or homosexual in orientation. Despite his final words of incredulity, Birkin cannot escape the novel's icy denouement or reverse the sequential passage of its plot. Like the story that contains him, he can go only one way.

In this respect, Lawrence's novel differs from the other set pieces of British modernism. Women in Love displays nothing like the framed narratives of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the dual time scheme of Joyce's Ulysses, or the rapid shifts of voice and linguistic register of Eliot's "The Waste Land." For better or for worse, Lawrence places his characters in the framework of a generally realistic fiction, tracing their fortunes and aspirations along a single narrative line. To be sure, this temporal organization is subject to a dialogic questioning. Often the narrative is checked by dissenting voices, not least among them that of Birkin, which suggest alternative plots or disjunctive temporalities. Yet at the macrostructural level these possibilities are contained, and the novel maintains a progressive time scheme? If this accounts for Lawrence's contested position within British modernism, it also explains why Birkin is denied the possibility of bisexuality. His longing for "another kind of love" is the novel's vanishing point, at once motivating the narrative but forbidden by the plot. Only by stepping outside this "endless traveling" of committed love can Birkin escape the social constraints that limit his libidinal fantasies.