Metaphor and mental disturbance: the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover - novel by D.H. Lawrence

Style, Spring, 1996 by Gerald Doherty

III. METAPHOR AND PSYCHOSIS

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, however, we may also see that metaphor possesses a dramatically different function. As an agent of orgasmic transcendence, its semantic polyvalence and versatility endow it with a new, positive role that combines Freudian remodelling with Ricoeurian redescription, adapting them to new contexts and uses. No longer seen as a symptomatic device that merely distorts reality, metaphor becomes the medium that reveals a rapturous "super-real." Purged of its pathological resonances, it maps out the path of jouissance, of sexual mastery, power, and complete wish-fulfillment. In this process, metaphor exchanges simple word-substitutions (the basis for symptom-formation) for extended figural networks that subsume old vestigial images into fresh mythical constellations, recharging them with new force and signification. This shift in rhetorical strategy marks a crucial psychological shift - from a wholesale disfiguration (neurosis) to a delusional wholeness (psychosis).

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, extended metaphorical relays chart the orgasmic trajectory. In so doing, they radically restructure the disjecta membra of the primary world of the text. In foreclosing a "degraded" metaphorical world based on the symptom, these relays open up a fantasmatic alternative one. In effect, each of the three major orgasmic enactments plots a progressive foreclosure on the disfiguring world of symptom-formation: each blots out the "real" world of the text in its own special way. By the same token, if the primary world defines the novel's norms of neurotic perception, these alternative worlds take on an increasingly psychotic, disjunctive, and hallucinatory tinge.

The rhetoric of the orgasmic has precisely the same two-tiered structure as the police/swallow story I previously recounted. There the foreclosure of a fearful literal event (arrest by the police) releases the force of the metaphorical event (attack by the swallows) that the psychotic interprets as real. Similarly, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the foreclosure of two of the text's major literal indices of dread and catastrophe signals their re-emergence as hallucinatory metaphors that constitute alternative worlds of the real. These two major indices are "water" and "coal-mining." Outside their use in the orgasmic trajectory, each carries a strongly destructive and deleterious charge.(10) The first (water) is the vehicle for the third and fourth orgasms: the second (coal-mining) is reserved for the last (the seventh). We can track the vicissitudes of each index in turn.(11)

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, "water" in general has a negative range of associations, where it signifies disintegration, decline, and the universal disaster of war. Its connotations stretch across a spectrum that includes individual fate and national destiny. From a plethora of examples, I choose five typical ones. In the "terrible year 1917," Connie and Clifford are intimate "as two people who stand together on a sinking ship," after which Clifford is literally "shipped home smashed" (12); overcome by the fear that she is "going to pieces," Connie feels that she "must jump into the water and swim" (20); for Mrs. Bolton, the postwar Tevershall colliery is a "sinking ship," from which the miners must jump off "like rats" (105, 106); in its sheer destructive potential, Clifford's mechanical chair is like "a pinnace on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization!" (185); most extravagantly of all, for Clifford, the whole postwar world is a "submarine jungle," in which "men and women are species of fish" (266).