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

Unlike Bhabha, for whom the iterative movement of postcolonial hybridity produces a heterogeneity that frustrates the repressive structures of imperialism, Lawrence's conceptions of cultural translation are caught in an ontological cast where differences are the effects of some more totalizing identity to be discovered in the future or the past. His characters are constantly rubbing up against each other, bringing into contact different cultures and sexualities, but the moment of fusion is forever denied: "No lovely fusion, no communion. No beautiful mingling of sun and mist, no softness in the air, never" (214). For all this, Lawrence struggles toward a recognition of ideals he cannot realize. Even as he verges into the most egregious proclamations of native "mystery" and indigenous otherness, he fumbles for a formula that might dismantle the racial and sexual polarities of the colonial situation, and for this, his primitivism must be remembered.

Lawrence's work provides a means of interrogating the contemporary construction of hybridity within postcolonial theory. As used today, the idea serves to dismantle the putatively essentialist categories of race developed in the theories of the past, such as those of E. B. Tylor. Yet as Robert Young has recently argued, the current "cultural" emphasis in postcolonial studies should not obscure the fact that "the racial was always cultural, the essential never unequivocal" (28). Lawrence's hierarchical ideal of the primitive as a space for hybrid "commingling" should alert us to the way in which contemporary postcolonial criticism often foregrounds the mutual implication of racial and gender discourses only by ignoring those of class, if not to the heterosexist assumptions inherent in the very idea of hybridity (Young 26). Without making too much of his frequent use of the word queer, we might ask how Lawrence's (always recontrolled) troubling of the split between hetero- and homosexuality destabilizes the division between self and other that underlies his projection of modern desires and anxieties onto primitive cultures.

By implying the possibility of a desire that is not regulated by the imperatives of sameness/otherness, Lawrence not only questions the Freudian pathology of homosexuality as narcissism, but also resists a model of power that reduces race and class differences to the derivative effects of sexual difference.(6) As such, his novels acquire that "distinctive complexity" which Judith Butler attributes to narratives that articulate/silence same-sex eroticism "at those junctures in which a compulsory heterosexuality works in the service of maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity" (18). Clearly, for Lawrence, the primitive is a category with diverse and shifting meanings, and thus it cannot impose itself on his narratives as a total organizing principle; its effects are always partial and dispersed. Still, it supplies a means for gauging the success of his attempts to move beyond the secular demands of modern rationality. If, as Young contends, our current reliance on the concept of hybridity shows that "we are still locked into parts of the ideological network of a culture that we think and presume that we have surpassed" (27), the most unsettling aspect of Lawrence's primitivism must be its proximity to contemporary efforts to think through the same problem.