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

In the frame preceding Connie's first coitus with Mellors, the narrator stresses her identification with nonhuman nature - with two hens and their chicks. At first, there is a disparity between Connie's sense of forlornness and barrenness and the hens' connectedness and fecundity, but eventually the hens become "the only things in the world that warmed her heart" (120). Some of the vital words used to describe the brooding hens and perky chicks will appear in descriptions of subsequent couplings, including: "warm," "deep," "blood," "alive," "ecstasy," "life," "new," " pure," "proud," "fearless" (119-22).

When representing the foreplay to the first coupling, the narrator uses bodily focalizations for the first time. In this and subsequent erotic scenes, the concept of character shifts: from a self constituted by personal and social qualities and acquirements - by a personality, persona, or ego - to a self founded on bodily, impersonal forces and responses? The characters are not so much the persons named Connie and Mellon as their impassioned bodies. Hands and genitals are central because they are the body's principal agents of touch and connection. These somatic characters do not have the fixed angle of vision of stock or flat characters, nor the changing scope and depth of vision of characters in realist fiction. Instead, the focalizations are primarily tactile and dynamic: the narrator registers surface changes in texture and warmth of the lovers' bodies, as well as deeper changes in pleasure and energy flow. These new focalizations seem to bridge traditional perspectival distinctions between subjective and objective, superficial and deep, internal and external, singular and multiple.(24) Meditators who contemplate their bodily feelings and sensations have a similar sense of overcoming dualistic consciousness. It is no accident that Mellors refers to the Buddha's emphasis on "awareness" (301). In the vivification phase, the plot line focusses on the sequence of exchanges among the somatic characters. The exchanges generally begin as immanent experiences of divinity and culminate in transcendental experience.(25) Immanent moments are associated with passionate contact leading up to orgasm; transcendental moments are associated with orgasmic or post-orgasmic oblivion. Both types of encounters occur in the Now, the present moment. The need to represent intense bodily rhythms and numinous energetic changes as they occur eliminates anachronisms - retrospections and prospections - and requires the frequent use of concrete, figural, and symbolic language and of repetitive and antithetical structures.(26) The new themes in this phase are the tenets of Lawrence's vitalistic religion. The religious ideas that Tommy Dukes schematically presented - holistic knowledge, phallic bridge, resurrection of the body, democracy of touch - are fleshed out and articulated by Connie and Mellors. Thus, to touch the reader's emotional body, Lawrence has transformed the conventional narrative categories.