Revitalizing the reader: literary technique and the language of sacred experience in D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover.'

Style, Spring, 1998 by Charles M. Burack

Before beginning my analysis of the sacralization phase, it will be useful to summarize the devices and discourses deployed in the destruction phase.(8) The main organizing technique is a satiric, hyper-modern narrator. This narratorial consciousness dissects the sexual attitudes and actions both of Clifford and his Cambridge colleagues and of young Connie and her sister Hilda.

The repeated dissections are intended to further the disintegration of the reader's own split consciousness - to mortify the reader's mindset. Following Nietzsche, Lawrence considered the modern split consciousness to be the result of an overemphasis on the logical, visual, and verbal processes associated with the head (brain, eye, ear, mouth).(9) The narrator calls attention to these logocentric and ocularcentric processes in the characters by using language that is highly analytic, reflexive, abstract, distancing, repetitive, objectifying, and assaultive. Many of the descriptive phrases have the objectifying quality of scientific and commercial discourses ("the sex thing," "the sex business," "merely her tool") (3-4). Readers are bombarded by scathing and reductive psychonarrations of Connie and Hilda: "[The sisters] were free to do as they liked, and - above all - to say what they liked. . . . Love was only a minor accompaniment. . . . The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anticlimax" (3). Readers are also disoriented by narratorial zigzagging between multiple periods in the sisters' lives (3). Moreover, the narrator cancels the meanings of key words like "love" and "sex" by endlessly repeating and interchanging them: "It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. . . . In the actual sex thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed" (5). Love and sex become as fungible as commodities. The overuse of scopic metaphors in the psychonarrations of the male characters underscores the underlying connection between vision and intellectualism. Clifford sees the world as if through "a microscope, or . . . a telescope" (13), and Michaelis uses his coercive, intrusive gaze to control Connie sexually ("fixing his eyes on her . . . and sending out an appeal that affected her direct in the womb") (24). In the long, largely nonnarrative stretches of the novel in which Clifford and his friends discuss their culture and each other, the modern split consciousness is more directly enacted in content and form: not only do the comrades talk about sex as "just another form of talk" (33), but they also analyze the malicious, intellectual nature of their own talk ("let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite") (37). Lawrence's critique of language and vision not only anticipates current theoretical discussions of logocentrism and ocularcentrism, but also partially subverts the patriarchal ideology voiced by the narrator and main characters and thus suggests that Lawrence may have had stronger sympathies with feminism than has been asserted.(10) Recently, such feminist theologians as Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether have cited dualistic thought and language as responsible for creating and sustaining sexist structures in Judaism and Christianity, and the Lacanian film critic Laura Mulvey has examined the objectifying and controlling features of the scopophilic male gaze.(11)