D.H. Lawrence's narrators, sources of knowledge, and the problem of coherence

Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Michael Squires

Readers of D. H. Lawrence have long been intrigued by the quality and texture of his prose. Its complex fragmentation has elicited widespread comment; its linguistic challenges are critical commonplaces. As part of what remains to be done, I want to examine Lawrence's use of fictional narrators and to focus on two related problems that it creates: the problem of coherence and, below that, the problem of the text's sources of knowledge. Analysis of Lawrence's narrators reveals that problems of coherence can be traced to his use of various narrative voices, and that these various voices depend on assumptions about his sources of knowledge which require careful scrutiny. My aim is to look across the wide span of Lawrence's fiction; to identify a line of technical development; to situate that line within the context of published criticism, both theoretical and practical, occasionally challenging received critical views; and, finally, as I reconsider some central passages in the Lawrence canon, to reach fresh conclusions about narrative coherence, sources of knowledge, and Lawrence's narrators.

This cluster of concepts has attracted extensive commentary, most of it designed to help readers understand Lawrence's characters and themes. Such understanding is not my purpose. Whereas Keith Sagar, Mark Spilka, and Stephen Miko regard Lawrence's narrators as vehicles of information or interpretation rather than as difficult constructs in the text, contemporary critics have located the sources of Lawrence's imaginative power in his highly developed intuitive and sensory equipment,(1) in his adaptation of the carnivalesque,(2) or in his ability to "transcode" experience,(3) and they have derived his conception of knowledge from biblical typology,(4) from Romantic poetry,(5) or from Aestheticism.(6) Diane Bonds understands this cluster of concepts as a narratological problem: but her deconstructive insights, though penetrating, are confined to the subversive features of Lawrence's texts.(7) The philosophical and narratological connections between narrators, knowledge, and coherence remain therefore to be defined. I anticipate that some of my distinctions may help to refine a critical method--rhetorical in origin, comparative in application--for negotiating the vexingly difficult bond between narrator and character.

Two related issues require at least preliminary comment. First, the notion of coherence as an aesthetic aim was beginning to be challenged by many early-Modernist writers. Marcel Proust, for example, analyzing Ruskin's criticism, wrote: "Apparently he moves at random from one idea to the next. But in truth the imagination which guides him follows his deepest inclinations, which impose on him a superior logic in spite of himself--so much so that, at the end, he finds he has obeyed a hidden plan which, when it is finally unveiled, imposes in retrospect a kind of order on the whole."(3) Such deeper patterns of coherence, lying below the level of conscious planning or structuring, reveal the structural components of intuition as they manifest themselves in narrative choices.

Second, the concept of knowledge needs to be defined in a philosophical context. Whereas Conrad despairs at the loss of an underlying unity that would illuminate daily life, and whereas Woolf relies heavily on immediate sensory experience, Lawrence glimpses something beyond the mind that knowledge cannot reveal but that intuition-residing in the blood, "where we have our strongest self-knowledge"(9) can. Whereas Kant views experience as already created "by the 'intuitions' of time and space . . . and known by no other means than those it names,"(10) Patrick Whiteley writes: "Lawrence rejoices that the lens [of unity] is shattered; he embraces the chaos that Western civilization wants to bring under its idea of order. For Lawrence, to be one with this darkness that grounds human existence is to turn the mind away from itself and back toward the body from which the mind arose before it became conscious of itself."(11) For Lawrence mind and body ought ideally to form a monistic whole. "But why do you persist in separating soul and body?" he demanded of Rachel Annand Taylor (26 October 1910). "I can't tell . . . one from the other."(12) Yet that condition of wholeness can occur only when the mind can no longer inspect itself, and can no longer distinguish between imagination and knowledge. That this condition is rarely achieved generates a kind of narrative shock. Lawrence's narrators, inveighing more and more against their society, "voice the conscience of the individual trapped in a morally corrupt society,"(13) thereby defining the implied relationship between a narrator and the characters about whom he writes. But the notion of giving conscience a "voice" begs the question of how a particular narrator discovers this moral-political content within each character-and of how the mode of discovery changes in successive literary works.

In Lawrence's early fiction the lack of coherence among sources of knowledge within the text fosters narrative instability. The White Peacock, published in 1911 when Lawrence was only twenty five, and Sons and Lovers, published two years later, illustrate his early difficulties with narrative control. In The White Peacock the narrator Cyril wavers between involvement and distance, between sensuousness and physical restraint. Notice the final sentence of the following passage from chapter five, where I have clarified the narrator's focalization(14) by employing italics to indicate what Lawrence might have written: