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

Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Michael Squires

We moved across to the standing corn. The sun being mild,

[I noticed that] George had thrown off his hat, and [that] his

black hair was moist and twisted into confused half-curls.

Firmly planted, he swung with a beautiful rhythm from the

waist. On the hip of his belted breeches hung the scythestone;

his shirt, faded almost white, was torn just above the belt, and

showed the muscles of his back playing like lights upon the

white sand of a brook. There was something exceedingly

attractive in the rhythmic body [To me his rhythmic body seemed

exceedingly attractive].(15)

Delight in the rhythmic sensuousness of work jostles against the narrator's attempt to efface his own pleasure. Like the tear in George's faded shirt, the passage opens inward toward discovery and visual stimulation. In the text knowledge enters through the eyes until the last sentence. There the narrator's indirection muffles the lure of male musculature, which is displaced from observation to meditation. A comparison of Connie Chatterley's visual apprehension of Mellors, half naked at his wash-basin, nicely distinguishes her visual and emotional "shock"(16) from Cyril's shift in perspective.

Later, when George and Lettie sit down in the forest, the narrator records the hum of bees and concludes: "The sight of their clinging, clambering riot gave satisfaction to the soul" (214). Whose soul? Two perspectives-that of the characters and that of the narrator-appeal for attention. The narrator does not yet know where to position himself so that he can plumb and then record depths of emotional experience. That skill will come as Lawrence develops a more expressive authorial voice.

In the meantime the loss of his mother, who was "strong and steadfast" (I, 195) but also "rather scornful" (I, 174), affected Law rence profoundly. Seeking to recover her presence vicariously, he introduced into his prose a fresh voice of judgment which had not been present in The Trespasser, the novel he drafted shortly before she died in 1910. The effect is curious. Lawrence introduced into Sons and Lovers the fresh technical problem of unifying judgment with narrative flow. To clarify the change, I compare two passages, one that I have recast in order to eliminate disruption, the other Lawrence's original, which reveals several fractures worth observing: first, the tenses would tee feeling and would reach out shift incoherently to felt and was; second, the incoherent time signal soon, which reflects a continuing action, requires a modal verb; and third, in the words "Both felt," the focalization of the final sentences shifts to Walter and Gertrude Morel as a couple. Here are the two versions, their differences italicized:

Recast

And Morel sitting there, quite alone, having nothing to think about, felt vaguely uncomfortable. At such times his soul reached out in its blind way to her and found her gone. Then he felt a sort of emptiness, almost like a vacuum in his soul. He appeared unsettled and restless, and,feeling oppressed in that atmosphere, he affected his wife. Both felt an oppression on their breathing, when they were left together for some time. Then he went to bed, and she settled down to enjoy herself alone, working, thinking, living.