Linguistic incantation and parody in Women in Love - novel by D.H. Lawrence

Style, Spring, 1996 by Jack Stewart

In "Carpeting," key words are bandied about in a colloquial discussion that airs some of the main issues raised by other linguistic means in visual and symbolic scenes. These key words are associated with major characters, who use them repeatedly: do with Hermione, who manipulates Birkin and chants the auxiliary as if she could turn people into her social auxiliaries (grammar and intonation reflecting volition); use with Gerald, who insists on his right to subjugate "lower" beings and instrumentalize being itself; will with both Hermione, who uses a neurasthenic will to control unconscious tendencies, and Gerald, who uses a bullying will to dominate himself and others. The three terms expose interacting modes of the will-to-power - manipulation, forcing, and control. Birkin stands apart as a detached critic of will who wants to go beyond the ego: "You've got to ... give up your volition," he tells Hermione in "Class-room" (44). Ursula is a "rare antagonist" of will power whose spontaneous being is directly opposed to Gudrun'sconcentrated knowing(4) or Hermione's doing.

What do these verbal repetitions, incantations, and cross-references add up to? Lawrence uses repetition plus variation to alter the meaning of basic concepts that he has compressed into and unfolded from the code words go, do, use, and will. The words retain static denotations for their users, yet the reified linguistic surface of "Carpeting" (a title that indicates decorative arrangement) is only tangential to the linguistic incantation of Lawrence's themes - signalling his awareness that no fixed meanings or exact equivalences exist between words and ideas. Indeed, "the distinguishing characteristic of the sign ... is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will" (Saussure 17). Knowledge is not an entity but a process. When Sir Joshua Malleson (based on Bertrand Russell) asserts exact equivalence - "Knowledge is, of course, liberty" - Birkin mocks his propositional logic with the rejoinder, "In compressed tabloids" (86). In such algebraic linkings of verbal counters (a=b), the meaning of neither word can be known through equation with the other. Gudrun, who (like Loerke) substitutes fixities for flux in the language of her art, immediately reifies Birkin's metaphor by "[seeing] the famous sociologist as a flat bottle ... labelled and placed forever in her mind" (86). The vital process of understanding "materializes" into a commodity in this aptly formulaic image. Gudrun pins concept to person in a dehumanized, one-dimensional "reading," graphically illustrating Malleson's own sclerotic use of language. The brittle "Breadalby" dialogue, in which Birkin asserts that living knowledge, as distinct from "knowledge of the past," can never be grasped,(5) demonstrates that "words ... are but a gesture we make." Just as Lawrence's language in "Excurse" points to an experience "that can never be transmuted into mind content" (320), so the language in dialogues becomes self-conscious, a series of moves in an ironic game in which words flourish but the text seems aware of their merely gestural function.