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

Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Michael Squires

To move in that direction invites a pointed question about Lawrence's work: what happens when he approaches the borders of language function? What happens when he transcends the old language that, as Virginia Woolf put it, reveals "gig-lamps symmetrically arranged" and, instead, discovers the "luminous halo" of subjective experience.?(27) Scott Sanders is surely right to say that Lawrence "forced his characters through the medium of words to the boundaries of language, beyond which they could sense powers and orders of being which neither he nor they could name."(28) In The Rainbow Lawrence, apart from experimenting with the angle of bonding between narrator and character, has--like Woolf or Proust--determined to reveal fresh layers of the dark unknown of intuition and instinct. That much is widely agreed. What is not is Lawrence's peculiar use of heuristics--conceptual heuristics--to explore a topos of darknes that exists beyond and beneath the light of nineteenth-century rationalism.

In the spendid passage that follows, Lawrence responds to the problem of coherence by using binary form as the heuristic to explore dialectical forces. As he experiments with angles of bonding, he accumulates increments caught in a widening narrative net. Ursula's knowledge and idiom yield gradually to the narrator's without, however, reaching full separation. The two opening paragraphs reveal the narrator's presence (angle 2) in what Stefan Oltean calls a "highly articulated rendering of the [girl's] internal states."(29) The third paragraph modulates to the narrator's record--so assured as to be quoted--of the alien group's defensive certainty, not as Ursula might imagine it but as the narrator does: yet that record still falls, because of the narrator's extreme empathy, within the range of Ursula's intuitive awareness. The final pragraph, in which opposed forces join, is articulated entirely in the narrator's distinct idiom and barely sustains Ursula's awareness.

[1] That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it

could not come forth. It was like a seed buried in dry ash [of

disillusion and falsity]. This world in which she [Ursula

Brangwen] lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This

lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness, she

thought was all the world: that here all was disclosed for ever.

Yet all the time, within the darkness, she had been aware of

points of light, like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming,

penetrating, vanishing. And her soul had acknowledged in a

great heave of terror only the outer darkness. This inner circle

of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains

rushed and the factories ground out their machine-produce and

the plants and the animals worked by the light of science and

knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an

arc-lamp, wherein the moths and children played in the

security of blinding light, not even knowing there was any

darkness, because they stayed in the light.

[2] But she could see the glimmer of dark movement just out