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

Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Michael Squires

Most of the critical commentary on this well-known passage(34) grapples with Ursula's aggression and Skrebensky's victimization, as if the lovers, inverted, were Tess and Alec d'Urberville, his aggressive coarseness violating her "feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer."(35) But what an interesting difference between the couples. Hardy's judging, moralizing voice ("the coarse appropriates the finer") is muted. Lawrence's narrator never asks, What is the moral scheme toward which a reader can be led? but rather, What does this character experience, deep inside, in a region of darkness or chaos, that can be communicated to a reader? And at what angle of bonding? Knowledge depends on narrative position.(36) If the narrator shifts his location--steps outside the region of darkness to look at the characters and their physical surroundings, tries to watch and to feel with them--then incoherence may result, as in "The water washed again over their feet, but she took no notice." For Lawrence the problem of focalization is always the problem of when to shift from inside to outside. It is as if the narrator's sources of knowledge recurrently dry up--or are shut off, or blocked--so that a visual default quickly fills in the space. Intuition is unstable, like the flash of fangs. Without inspiration or strict control, intuition--lapsing--allows a small narrative fissure to open. This is not a criticism of Lawrence's genius but an attempt to define the distinction of his technical resources and the uniqueness of his imagination.

As Lawrence's imagination operates more capaciously and begins more subtly to integrate forms of disruption, a major realignment takes place. The angle of bonding between narrator and character gradually shifts from a similarity of perspective (angles 1 and 2) to a dissimilarity of perspective (angles 3 and 4). This central shift characterizes Lawrence's work of the Twenties, but has its source in the later parts of Women in Love (1920), where the realignment of the narrator's sympathy is especially marked. I want to conclude my discussion of knowledge and coherence--and Lawrence's increasingly complex uses of them--by examining passages from his final decade that probe the minds of Gudrun Brangwen and then Oliver Mellors. Both passages illustrate how ,he sense of profound disruption remains but is now increasingly mastered, so that disruption is masked by the poise and authority of an assured narrative voice.

Readers of Women in Love always notice the subtle evolution of Gudrun's character from the narrator's cautious appreciation to his cold skepticism. But critical junctures along this path have been harder to isolate. A passage about Gudrun, which is both artistically accomplished and puzzlingly focalized, holds particular interest because of its subtle "rupture." Charles Ross seconds F. R. Leavis's notion that the organization of Women in Love "is so rich and close" that there is "not a scene, episode, image or touch but forwards the organized development of the themes."(37) In a sweeping sense surely that is true. But in individual passages one is often surprised to find not lapses or flaws, nor even contradictions, but curious shifts (even dissonances) that reveal a counterforce through which some deeper structure can emerge. It is as if what Lawrence wrote about Etruscan art were also true of his own prose, with "one thing springing from another, things mentally contradictory fusing together emotionally."(38) These shifts need analysis.