D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Brian Murray

by Weldon Thornton. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. xiii 174 pages. $23.95

Weldon Thornton's approach to D. H. Lawrence's short fiction is insightful and fresh. In D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction, Thornton sheds light on the style of Lawrence's fiction without also discussing, yet again, the drama of Lawrence's life or the limitations of his more idiosyncratic views. Thornton clearly admires Lawrence's art. He is interested in Lawrence's ideas and in the debates they continue to spark. But he also believes that too many critics have failed to heed Lawrence's own famous advice to trust not the author but the tale. They have blundered by assuming that Lawrence's stories must invariably show "some biographical key," or illustrate "some abstractable Lawrencean theme," or epitomize "some phase or category of his work." This approach, Thornton argues, dulls "a full appreciation of the technical skill, the psychological depth, and the thematic subtlety of Lawrence's work."

Unlike most recent critics of Lawrence's work, then, Thornton has no blunt ideological ax to grind. He firmly believes, however, that Lawrence's moody, evocative, and "elusive" stories must be "given the close attention they deserve." Working within the rather narrow confines of the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction series, Thornton has chosen to attend "carefully to a smaller number of Lawrence's stories"--namely, nine. These include "Odour of Chrysanthemums," "The Blind Man," and "You Touched Me," all of them widely reprinted and analyzed.

Thornton's fresh readings of these stories proceed from views he outlines in his first chapter, "D. H. Lawrence and the Short Story." Here Thornton reminds readers of the widely known but often forgotten fact chat, in so many ways, Lawrence as story writer stands alone. He was no Victorian. He was no modernist, either. Lawrence's "best work," Thornton argues, "calls into play psychological dimensions and aesthetic sensibilities not fully explored by most modernist literature." Of course Lawrence knew and sometimes admired the short fiction of both his predecessors and his contemporaries, including Chekhov, Mansfield, and Joyce. But, as Thornton points out, these writers "had litHe tangible influence on him, nor, in the case of more recent writers, he on them." Lawrence did not "abjure `telling' in favor of `showing.'" His stories are not generally built "upon a single effect." They tend not to end with "epiphanic" moments meant to provide key characters with unexpected or ironic insights. "More often," writes Thornton, Lawrence's stories end with characters "struggling" to understand or accept their feelings or acts.

Thornton concedes that, of course, much of Lawrence's work in the genre recalls "another important species of story, indigenous to Britain and represented in the works of Stevenson, Hardy, Kipling, and, more recently, A. E. Coppard and H. E. Bates." Lawrence's stories are sometimes similarly lengthy and broad in scope; the often include a narrator "either playing some active role in events or functioning as storyteller." Still, the sheer distinctiveness of Lawrence's short fiction always shows through.

For Lawrence's art is, as Thornton repeatedly stresses, "exploratory." It grows out of Lawrence's bold and unusual impulse, evident in all of his work, to "engage and explore experience, to work through his own nascent, tentative ideas and feelings." It also reveals "assumptions about the relation of author to character" quite unlike those of Lawrence's contemporaries. Lawrence, notes Thornton, certainly departs from "the ideal of objectivity" famously described by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Lawrence, unlike Joyce, never intended to appear "beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence . . . paring his fingernails." Instead Lawrence often aims to "dwell in each" of his characters "as fully as possible." Thus, within a single story Lawrence might shift perspectives, but not necessarily sympathies. Lawrence put himself "fully into the psyche and situation" of many of his most compelling characters, aiming to convey their "feelings, wishes, thoughts." This, in turn, might require the capturing of a point of view that is limited or confused or both--"but presented with such fullness and conviction as to sound authorial." Often, then, "the words printed on the page may represent something so subconscious or vaguely formed that the character would deny it to be his thought. Or the text may present with fervor a feeling that is intense but fleeting, that does not represent the character's typical or considered thinking."

Thornton does not deny Lawrence's continuing interest in certain characters and themes. For example, Lawrence often judged his characters "on whether they are life-affirmers or life-deniers"; he often explored "the `drift toward death'" in his stories--including "The Woman Who Rode Away." But Thornton consistently stresses that a full appreciation of Lawrence's work only begins with an understanding of his themes. One must be aware not only of this shifting and inclusive narrative technique, but also of the "subtle contextuality" and "psychic texture" of Lawrence's stories, and of his demanding attempt to "do justice to the full complexity of the living situation he is depicting."