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

Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Michael Squires

It seems very likely that in composing The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers (1913) Lawrence found a niche of new perception when he discovered first that Siegmund and Helena, lying on the beach, comprise "two grains of life in the vast movement" of oceans, clouds, and circling spheres(31) and then, with rapidly developing insight, that Paul and Clara, after making love, had pierced the known in order to discover "life wild at the source" where, dwarfed by a "magnificent power," they comprise "only grains in the tremendous heave" (398). The known prefigures the light of the campfire, the darkness plumbing an order below language, below perception, below even consciousness. This order is articulated with great difficulty, it may invite disruption, and it may require the narrator's direct intervention. The "vastness" and "tremendousness" are overwhelming--to the characters, whose instinctual response is awe, and to the narrator, who must struggle both to open categories of perception and to negotiate rhetorical modes of expression.

Second--apart from the passage's focalization--its impressive coherence is, after all, disturbed in paragraphs three and four by the biblical voice, with its lordly repetitions and its "unto us is given." That voice, although it arguably extends Ursula's critique of the "Sunday" system of thought in chapter ten, nevertheless substitutes a rhetorical mode for the discovery of new knowledge which the passage centrally explores. The difficulty is real. Instead of discovering the function of the vital animal eyes as they connect light/consciousness and dark/unconsciousness, the narrator's heuristic of a three-part spatial model (i.e. light and dark, with eyes between) is skewed: it "discovers" a rhetoric of revelation and apocalypse in "the flash of fangs" and "the flash of the sword of angels." One cannot deny the grandeur of such language, nor the differences between it and the categorical absolutes of the Sunday system; but one can say that Lawrence, by drawing on a known rather than a partially unknown language system, compromises the deeper search for conduits of exchange between conscious and unconscious regions.

That deeper search, however, is only delayed. Near the end of The Rainbow--while the horses thunder near Ursula, impinging on her psyche--the gleaming points of animal eyes emerge, activated now, given clearer shape and sharper function, successfully mediating between Ursula's conscious and unconscious minds. In such writing Lawrence brilliantly captures the space between the two minds: it is a space full of dynamic activity, like atoms leaping in a chemical transaction. In the horses scene Ursula's new knowledge of herself derives not from the chafing of one rhetorical code against another but from the interplay of her conscious and her unconscious selves. Here, Lawrence fully controls his sources of knowledge, making them function both technically and thematically.

There is another approach to the conjunction of sources of knowledge and narrative coherence in Lawrence's work. In a later passage from The Rainbow, which follows Ursula and her lover Anton Skrebensky to the ocean's edge, I differentiate between the passage I have recast and the passage Lawrence wrote in order to show both the divided focalization and the problem it entails within this mixed perspective: