Sex and Language in D. H. Lawrence Author(s): David J. Gordon Reviewed work(s): Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol.

27, No. 4 (Winter, 1981), pp. 362-375 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441174 . Accessed: 04/03/2012 13:14
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

Sex

and

Language

in

D.

H.

Lawrence

DAVIDJ. GORDON

It is a mark of sophistication among literary interpreters to recognize that the verbal medium they are governed by is a means as well as an end, that language is inherently so figurative that the meaning of a text is always a matter of self-conscious rhetoric as well as direct reference. Influenced by the current authority of linguistics, some critical theorists in recent years have even attempted to discard as naive the mimetic and referential functions of language. They would enclose us in a verbal world by declaring an impassable gulf between it and a world outside of words. This new skepticism or linguistic autonomy can be dramatized by the following two contrasts, one literary, one psychoanalytic. First, D. H. Lawrence in 1929-"Poetry, they say, is a matter of words. ... It is such a long way from being the whole truth that it is slightly silly if uttered sententiously"1-versus William Gass in 1972-"That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really."2 Lawrence implies that the poet expresses and evokes a subsistent physical life through language whereas Gass calls our attention to the illusory nature of any such attempt. A second contrast, Freud versus Lacan. In An Outlineof Psychoanalysis, Freud acknowledged the challenge of epistemologists by writing: "We have no hope of being able to reach [reality itself], since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible to free ourselves."3 That is, he accepted a dependence on language as the condition of our knowing anything yet believed that valid inferences about a presumable reality could nevertheless be made. Lacan influentially proposed a different doctrine when he asserted that the unconscious is not something other than a language: hence psychoanalytic terms like condensation and 362

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE displacement can be translated into rhetorical ones like metaphor and metonymy and hence a term like phallus, though far from abandoned, can be understood entirely without reference to a physical reality.4 In view of the currency of this hyper-sophisticated point of view, it seems to me important to say that the apparently naive functions of referring-play an indispensable part in the aplanguage-imitating, of literature. For without direct, empathetic responses to the preciation action of a novel, play, or poem, there is no aesthetic experience or value. It is true that literary art is distinguished from subliterary texts' by its linguistic self-consciousness. The language of art functions not merely as a window through which we perceive a palpitating reality: it calls attention to itself. But it is precisely our perception of the interplay between these two aspects of our response-the naive and the selfconscious-that enables us to identify an aesthetic structure. In reading literature, we allow ourselves to believe that an imaginary enactment is real while knowing-and knowing its author knows-that its only reality is verbal or symbolic. The fascination of literature is that an avowed symbolization of the psychic life is temporarily made to seem real, as real somehow as the physical world. We know of course that this experience is an illusion, that we are still enclosed in a world of words. And so the modern critic often looks with special interest at the psychoanalyst, who is faced by real persons, not merely books. True, the French Freudians tell us the psyche is a text. But unlike a text, which exists materially in separation from writer and reader, it is part of a physical body. Psychoanalysis is an interpretive art allied to criticism that seems to have kept open an avenue to a real, physical world beyond a self-enclosed world of words. It enables us to talk about a phenomenon like sexuality-which is important psychologically and yet a real physical function-with some hope of escaping the sensation of being trapped in a hall of mirrors, of being shut into what has been called the prison-house of language. The assertion that creativity is a supreme mark of our human freedom will seem like mockery unless we can believe that the created text bears a significant relation to-in effect validates-something outside of it and the reader's consciousness. D. H. Lawrence is a novelist of exemplary interest in this connection because his obsession with sex manifests itself as a quest to discover through sex a world beyond or below words, a naive consciousness that civilized man has crusted over with self-consciousness and the accompanying experience of separation and aloneness. At the same time, Lawrence understood very well that he was bound to language and 363

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE could only pursue this quest through the sophisticated resources of civilization. Thus we reach the central paradox of his work: we must go forward through conscious, articulate realization in order to go backward to psychic fulfillment and peace. His consequent ambivalence toward language and consciousness creates the tensions that are at the heart of the aesthetic experience he affords, and I propose to examine here the working out of these tensions in two of his principal novels, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover, hoping to demonstrate the fruitful interaction between thematic stress and self-conscious rhetoricity. Women in Love was mostly written during the Great War, which looms unmentioned in the background but lends a life-and-death urgency to the sexual battles in the dramatized foreground. The novel begins with a piquant scene of two sisters (its original title was The Sisters) who are discussing the question of marrying-should they or shouldn't they? According to the conventions of the Victorian novel, in view of which the scene is written, marriage is a woman's promised end or, in the most searching cases (Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Jude), her anguished but still inescapable destiny. Lawrence's independent sisters mock the institution as the end rather than the beginning of experience but with a bravado that betrays their uneasiness. Marriage and love have become problematic in Womenin Love and not just as an institution and a feeling: the meaning of those words is now in doubt. The successful lovers, Birkin and Ursula, spend much of their novelistic time haggling over definition. Some readers impatiently ask, what exactly does Birkin want? On the one hand, he doesn't want too much closeness, merging, steamy domesticity, as if he fears the power of a woman. (We remember the scene in which he stones the moon's reflection, symbol of the Magna Mater.) On the other hand, he wants something as indissoluble as Victorian marriage, something you can't go back on, something that promises to cure his acute sense of separateness. What he is searching for is not exactly a way of living because like Lawrence he is scarcely interested in the social aspect of marriage. He is searching for a way of speaking, a phrase that will epitomize his combined attraction and repulsion. The phrase he invents is "starpolarity"; the gravitational action of material bodies, centripetal and centrifugal at once, expresses for him the tension of contrary psychological forces. Almost every scene of the novel shuttles between a concern for getting at the truth and for the linguistic means of doing so, between 364

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE

reference and rhetoric, sex and language. Lawrence was too earnest to make writing into a language game primarily. Yet he was too sophisticated not to know that, as a writer seeking to dramatize preconscious thought and feeling, he would have to wrestle with a resistant medium unaccustomed to such use, or would have to let his characters do so. In the Foreword to the American edition, he aggressively defends this intention: "Any man of real individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along. This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art. It is a very great part of life."5 But the strain of trying to literalize what were after all metaphors is often evident, and is occasionally acknowledged during the novel: "There is always confusion in speech. Yet it must be spoken" (WL, p. 178). Womenin Love, broadly speaking, falls within the realistic tradition of narrative fiction. But we soon notice how urgently Lawrence's language pulls us away from narrative interest as such. In the second scene of the novel, for example, the sisters are abruptly confronted by potential lovers in whom they are interested, but Lawrence is trying for something more strenuous than what could be called an account of a budding intimacy. Here is Gudrun's first reaction to Gerald Crich, before a word has been spoken between them: There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. "His totem is the wolf," she repeated to herself. "His mother is an old unbroken wolf." And then she experienced a keen paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. .... Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that (WL, p. 9) envelopes only us two? This style of conveying psychological reactions as if they were violent physical actions and of using incremental, almost hypnotic repetition, as if the prose were performing rather than describing-such a style is a deliberate gamble with the limits of language. Lawrence acknowledged as much in his Foreword, where he defended this style not only as natural to the author but also appropriate to his purpose:
365

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

"every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination" (WL, p. viii). By this sexualization of style, Lawrence suggests that distinctions of personality in fiction are relatively superficial and conventional, that our lives are truly characterized by a more intense but less personal flux of sensation. To be sure, in trying to register this flux with little recourse to the stigmata that readers are accustomed to rely on in distinguishing fictional persons, he runs a risk, as has often been noted, of making his persons hard to tell apart. But the point is that he understood the difficulty, and devised alternative distinctions of a more abstract, allegorical kind. In the passage quoted, for example, we get our bearings by discerning the potential sado-masochism in the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald and by clustering the images of fair hair and arctic light into a potential symbolic meaning that will function like a concept. Ursula's reaction to Birkin, by contrast, is less certain, and is established in part by her awareness of his unwholesome dependence on Hermione, who responds to his seeming absence at a wedding party with an inner violence not unlike Gudrun's. The Ursula-Birkin relationship will also be marked by more acceptance of the sensual wisdom associated with darkness. Thus Lawrence is preparing us to understand the movement of his story-the failure of one couple and the (qualified) success of another-as a progress of states of being more than of personalities. One could fairly allegorize the central contrast of the novel as one between a narcissistic dissolution within an egoistic shell and a creatively destructive dissolution of an egoistic shell. A brilliant device used by Lawrence to objectify states of being has been called the constitutive symbol,6 a term referring to the central image in certain scenes that enables him to dramatize a relational tension: Gerald reining in the mare before the oncoming train and perceived differently by Gudrun and Ursula; Birkin stoning the lunar reflection and watched skeptically by Ursula; Gudrun and Gerald watching the arrogant movements of the tomcat Mino; Gerald and Birkin wrestling ritually though not quite with the same understanding. These semi-allegorical actions do not advance the plot as such but they clarify a pattern of meaning, and help set up later climactic eventsnotably, Gerald's death in the snow and Birkin and Ursula's purgative night in Sherwood Forest in which all sexual shame is burned away. Although the effect of the purgative night does seem to attenuate at the end, as Birkin still hankers for male friendship to complement marriage, this finale can be interpreted instead as a characteristic Law366

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE

rentian compromise between hope and despair, a falling back to the Romantic faith in potentiality, in what Wordsworth called "something ever more about to be." Lawrence in fact had to struggle artistically with the theme of homosexual love so as to keep the finale sufficiently open. In an earlier, rejected draft of the novel, Birkin's homosexual inclinations are directly expressed, and in that light one could interpret the wrestling, which works toward a compact of blood-brotherhood rather than sexual intimacy, as an evasion on Lawrence's part, a shying away from the truth of his own temperament for lack of moral courage. But such an inference is not consistent with his characteristic audacity, and it is not necessary to make it. It is more likely, as one critic pointed out,7 that Lawrence's refinement here was essentially artistic: the homosexual theme worked better indirectly. So, for the most part, sexual attractiveness in the novel is viewed from the woman's point of view, and the wrestling is presented as a sublimated eroticism. The gladiatorial scene makes the further point that Gerald, who wants to keep the social forms intact, though at bottom he feels hopeless, cannot admit to himself the value of such intimacy. This is brought out nicely in the earlier scene ("Totem") at Halliday's flat, where again a central image, the primitive carving of the naked woman in labor, serves to dramatize differences in perspective. The interest of Halliday's friends is merely a kind of radical chic, and their homosexual manners are accordingly satirized. Birkin perceives in the statue a profoundly archaic art-speech that the white race at its peril is losing the ability to respond to imaginatively. And Gerald, though disturbed by it and surreptitiously attracted to it as to Minette, turns in hatred against "the sheer barbaric thing": "He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing." To Birkin he says, "You like the wrong things, Rupert ... things against yourself' (WL, p. 72). Lawrence the artist, in other words, uses crucial images and symbolic actions as organizing principles to offset the inherent ineffability of a style that attempts to register the to-and-fro of sensation. Sex as theme and idea, one might say, balances sex as style and mode of expression. Another organizing device, clarifying the major contrast between the two principal couples, is the perspectival use of Hermione in the first half of the novel and of Loerke in the second half. It is important to understand that these two figures, like the four principals, are Lawrentian aristocrats in that they are above the sordid business of getting and spending and are concerned primarily with the adventure of the spirit. But Hermione is incapable of real belief. She fakes com367

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE mitment by mouthing the form of Birkin's words as if they expressed her own beliefs. And since she does not even know her "lie," her consciousness is hopelessly split, and she is, in Lawrentian terms, insane. Birkin for his part shows by his residual attachment to her that he is still intellectualizing his instinctual life, but he knows this and struggles against it. The incident of her bashing his head symbolically cleanses him of any further responsibility toward that source of unwholesome influence. As for Loerke, he is a more conscious cynic. The narrator expresses a grudging admiration for him because he has accepted disillusionment and self-division so finally; he is called "the wizard rat that swims ahead" (WL, p. 419), which resembles a phrase later used about Michaelis in Lady Chatterley'sLover, "an extreme of impurity that is pure." Evidence of this easy self-division in the artist Loerke is that he can, on the one hand, deliberately create an ugly art to reflect the ugliness of a modern industrial civilization and, on the other, thrill to the elegant artistic perfections of a bygone Romantic era. The cynic and the idealist are two sides of a coin. In his idealization of the past, he strongly attracts the sympathy of Gudrun, but Ursula, speaking for Lawrence, tells him that he is too far gone to see that art is always an attempt to achieve wholeness. The destinies of the sisters and their lovers are thus diametrically different even though Lawrence has to push and pull a little in the process of making them so. He is not altogether convincing in his effort to prevent Birkin (or sometimes Ursula) from being his own mouthpiece. And perhaps he is not quite fair in turning Gudrun at last into a demonic destroyer, as if Gerald is being punished by her for not accepting Birkin's friendship. But Gerald's death is finely done, at least on the symbolic level. If on the literal level it seems unfair to emphasize how fated he is from early childhood while burdening him most of all with the responsibility of choice, on the symbolic level he attains a certain grandeur as the vehicle of white civilized consciousness crucified by its failure to integrate the dark life of the body. What I want to stress here regarding the resolution of Lawrence's novel is that it makes success and failure a matter both of sexuality and of speech. Gerald fails to come into new being through sexual relationship and correspondingly he falls into speechlessness. Gudrun sidetracks a sensual rebirth and regresses appropriately to a pseudosophisticated playing with words and sentiments. Birkin and Ursula are shown on the last page of the novel still wrestling not only with love but with the meaning of love: 368

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE "You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you!" "It seems as if I can't," he said. "Yet I wanted it." "You can't have it, because it's false, impossible," she said. "I don't believe that," he answered. (WL, p. 473) It is a rather grim kind of bickering, but the point is that it's open, unresolved. These lovers may have a future. There is a profounder parallel between sex and language intimated in the novel, for both are shown to be an incomplete but supreme means of contact between persons. After the sexual embrace we are thrown back painfully on our own separateness, but for Lawrence it is the closest we come-religion having passed-to spiritual peace. It is both a crucifixion ("Why were we crucified into sex?" he asks in "Tortoise Shout," one of his best poems) and a communion. Similarly, speech and, still more, writing imply a permanent gulf between persons, yet they are an inescapable and powerful means of attaining such a communion. "Books are not life," he asserts despairingly in "Why the Novel Matters," but adds, they are "tremulations upon the ether . . . which can make the whole man alive tremble."8 In his recent book, The Realistic Imagination, George Levine rightly credits Lawrence with the dark knowledge of "the dissociation of language from being" but says "he never gave up the hope in his fiction and out of it of rebuilding a knowable community."9 Freud in his 1914 essay on narcissism wrote that "in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill."10 Like many other literary artists of the modern period, Lawrence seems to have written so that he would not fall ill: "Art for my sake," he declared in an early letter.1" Writing may be to some extent a substitute for loving, but it is also, as Freud and others have observed, a transfer of a primary narcissism onto an object that can be enjoyed by others and thus provide an escape from utter self-enclosure. But it is of course an indirect escape, and it is no wonder that the words language and consciousness (and synonyms for these words) are used throughout Lawrence's work in both a negative and a positive sense. Lady Chatterley'sLover is a less strenuous though by no means unambitious novel. It was written three times over in the late twenties when Lawrence knew he was dying. Its essential structure is a common fantasy-in fact a typical daydream-though one with traceable roots in the childhood situation of a man who was the son of a coal miner and of a mother with pretensions to gentility. A superior, desirable woman, wasting in a 369

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

marriage to an impotent, insensitive aristocrat, meets an outsider, a natural man, with whom she enjoys an idyllic interlude culminating in her pregnancy. The daydream aspect of the book-the obviousness of the direction in which the story is going-makes it resemble popular fiction superficially, but its complications testify not only to Lawrence's awareness of the pressures of social reality but also to his sophisticated self-consciousness as an artist. Indeed, George Levine claims that the novel is to a significant degree about the writing of a novel. He points to the parodic value of the narrator's cliche-ridden style in the first half, which reflects the artificial drawing-room talk and Clifford Chatterley's shallowly clever writing at the same time that the narrator is exposing and repudiating it.'2 One might add that, although Clifford is presented with scant sympathy, Lawrence was probably aware of putting something of himself into him, as he too was impotent at this period of his life. A similar process seems to be involved in the imagining of Connie's unsatisfactory lover, Michaelis. Although his attack on Connie for withholding her orgasm is presented as mean-spirited, we recall that the narrator tartly reported her doing this with a youthful lover; and if the narrator seems to attack Michaelis for finishing too quickly, we can't help remembering that Middleton Murry hinted broadly this inadequacy was Lawrence's own.'3 The idyllic interlude, like the idyllic moment almost always in Lawrence, is a rebirth following a painful spiritual death-rather different from the daydreams of popular fiction. And here, as in Women in Love, the cleansing of the unwholesome civilized consciousness is understood as both a sexual and a linguistic process. It is a matter of breaking down inhibitions of feeling and restraints of convention that have caused (as Connie realized in Wragby Hall) the great dynamic words to go dead. She and her gamekeeper must, so to speak, learn not only to fuck but also to say the word so as to recover a speech that is, in Yeats's fine phrase, "ancient, humble, and terrible." A simple defiance of social and linguistic convention is hardly what the novel is seeking to achieve. Our lovers in the woods or in the hut are not out of Paul et Virginie or The Blue Lagoon, but are "battered warriors" in the grim game of love, particularly the older Mellors, who suffers from "a bellyful of remembering," mainly of the bullying will of his estranged wife who creates an oppressive scandal for them both that is not resolved by the end of the book. Their lovemaking is not even very successful at first. It takes time for them to weaken the inhibitions fortified by their awareness of the power of iron and coal, and to begin
370

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE to recover natural beauty and "the riches of desire." In fact, of course, they never completely do so. The "pure peace" that Mellors experiences on entering the woman is soon followed by a lament that love means being broken open and exposed to a world in which there are too many people. They do achieve a measure of tenderness ("Tenderness" was a projected title for the novel), like Birkin and Ursula, after a strenuous night of burning out the sources of shame. Whether or not the suggestion in both novels of anal intercourse as a means of rebirth is symbolically adequate, it is clear enough that, in Lawrentian, unlike popular, romance, natural love is not something merely apart from civilization but is profoundly corrupted by it. At the end of Lady Chatterley, we are left quite uncertain as to what kind of future is possible for Connie and Mellors. In the third, familiar version of the novel, Lawrence changed his gamekeeper, earlier called Parkin, from a mere man of the people to what Connie's snobbish sister calls "almost a gentleman," giving the relationship a chance to survive in society. But the chance is not very promising. One feels that their romance has peaked in the novel's pastoral centerpiece: a ritual of rebirth symbolized by new-hatched chicks, rain-soaked coupling, and genital flower-twining. In its culminating moments, the lovemaking of Connie and Mellors is said to have achieved an "unfathomable silence," a "ponderous, primordial tenderness." Such phrases help to make the four-letter words ancient, humble, and terrible rather than the language of schoolboy defiance. They are good examples of Lawrence's effort to use language in an effort to suggest a world beyond or below language. Connie at Wragby "hated words, always coming between her and life"-life being some sort of subsistent actuality that words at best can only evoke. Nevertheless it is clear that everywhere in the novel-in the hut as well as in the drawing room-there is talk, talk, talk. Lady Chatterley'sLover is a preachy novel, so much so that James Joyce sarcastically dubbed it Lady Chatterbox's Lover.'4 Lawrence knew it was preachy, and in his forthright, not to say brazen, way tried to make a virtue of the fact: "This is the real point of this book" [he wrote in "Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover"]. "I want men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely, honestly and cleanly."15 No doubt this is sincere, but at the same time he was writing sarcastically of "sex in the head." And the novel itself is full of the same conflicting evidence, testifying to Lawrence's profound ambivalence toward verbal consciousness. The narrator endorses Connie's view of the mental life as a "swindle," yet in Chapter IX speaks of the power of "the novel 371

LITERATURE TWENTIETH CENTURY properly handled" to "reveal the most secret places of life." And it is clear from that chapter that the properly handled novel must in our time attempt not only to evoke a pristine consciousness but to repudiate an old one through satirical particularity. In short both kinds of intercourse are required. The novel ends significantly with a figure of speech that epitomizes the problematic relation between sex and language. Closing his letter to Connie with a playful use of colloquial names for the genitals, Mellors writes: "John Thomas says goodnight to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart." (John Thomasand LadyJane is the title of the now published second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover.) This pleasantry is both personification and synechdoche: the genitals are given the names of persons, and parts of the body substitute for the whole body. It thus asserts imaginatively an identity between nominal and actual physical presence, but implies at the same time, as a self-conscious figure of speech, separation and incompleteness. Language enables yet frustrates. Lawrence the vivacious rhetorician evidently finds a specific satisfaction through writing, though he is compelled to seek in thought a reality beyond words. This dual awareness is much closer in spirit to Freud than to Lacan, though Lawrence objected vigorously to Freud's view of repression because it accepted as forever impossible a return to the Eden of wordless unity. What is important is that it does not dichotomize language and sexuality, mind and body. Lawrence was pained by the realization that writing was indirect, symbolic expression yet it was expression:it was of the body and arose mysteriously from the pre-verbal life of the body. Freud too did not dichotomize mind and body even after he abandoned the Project; he retained the conviction that "our provisional ideas in psychology will someday be based on an organic substructure."16 There is a difference, in other words, between these recognitions of the symbolic or provisional nature of reference and a categorical Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensae. It is remarkable that the insistence on the "floating signifier" in the work of Jacques Lacan and his followers, while used to attack the Cartesian cogito, results in the absolute separation of mind from matter for which Descartes himself is often blamed. Lacan's argument is abstract to say the least, but the gist seems to be that the human infant first discovers selfhood as an image, in the so-called mirror-stage (stade du miroir) between six and eighteen months; thus, whereas the Freudian ego is an agent of synthesis, mastery, integration, and adaptation, the Lacanian ego is "constitutedby an identification with another ... 372

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE perpetually threatened by its own otherness to itself."17 Lacan finds this idea supposedly in Freud himself, particularly in the 1914 essay on Narcissism, but it is different in conception. It arises from a philosophical tradition of dialectic rather than from psychological observation of infantile conflict and development. For Lacan, the concepts "ego" and "unconscious" have the same status as "phallus." They are all names. None has any reference; they are all floating signifiers. Phallus Is Desire Perpetually In Search (which is true enough, from a comic point of view). The Ego is an Illusory Presence or The Absence of A Presence (a phrase which again has comic possibilities). And "the unconscious is structured like a language. ... It is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier."18 Lacan liked to charge the Freudians, especially the ego psychologists, with repressing repression because they tried to smooth out the contradictions in Freudian theory. He himself might be charged with repressing repression by making it a matter of logic and discursive inconsistency rather than of dynamic, affective psychology. If Kenneth Burke was right in saying that Freud's was an essentializing rather than proportionalizing strategy, with wish as the key term,19 then it might be said that Lacan adopted a parallel strategy with word as the key term. But one must concede that his transposition of Freud into another key-fusing conflict with dialectic, psychology with metaphysics-has transformed the French intellectual scene. Before 1950, Freud was scarcely read in France, badly translated, little commented on; since then, and due to Lacan, his work has generated a spate of amazingly resourceful and influential revisionist criticism. And the effort to absorb this into American criticism has led to many thoughtful mediations of the two contrary strategies, one little instance of which is, I hope, the present paper. What I miss above all in literary criticism inspired by Lacan, although Jonathan Culler in his recent Pursuit of Signs seems to say I shouldn't even be looking for it, is some attempt to explain the experience of literature-to deal with self-alienation, if that is in question, as an imaginative act. I would like, for example, to think of Rimbaud's famous solecism-Je est un autre-as such an act rather than a principle of metaphysics. And I doubt that Lacanian criticism could give me any sense of the strange beauty of the delusional system of Freud's patient, Dr. Schreber; or of Kafka's gloss on Genesis as a story of "God's rage against humanity"; or of Beckett's brilliant playlet "Not I."20 To return to Lawrence. He is far from the most self-conscious

373

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

rhetorician among sophisticated modernist writers, but I think that all genuine literary artists, since Homer, have used what's now called rhetoricity to establish a framework of play and game, thus permitting us to regress temporarily to a naive acceptance of the mimetic and referential functions of words. For without such an acceptance, the substantiation of the world (or of the word) cannot take place, and literature is not alive. Lawrence believed with Freud, despite some resistance, that the human heart must remain in conflict, a conflict between nature and culture or between competing instincts. There is no return to a wordless, undifferentiated state in the Edenic womb. And the stoical Freud believed with the romantic Lawrence, despite some resistance, in the ongoing joy of expression, at once physical and verbal. The marvelous plasticity of Lawrence's language and the brilliant treatises on dreams, jokes, and mistakes (the very stuff of comedy) take us beyond a tragic vision. They show us that, in the endless play of the mind, the physical and verbal aspects of consciousness, though never identical, cannot be separated.
1Phoenix: The PosthumousPapers of D. H. Lawrence, edited with an introd. by William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Vintage Books, Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis,The James Strachey transla-

Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 255.

2

1972), p. 27.
3

tion, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1949), p. 53. 4 See A trans. particularlychaps. 5 and 8 of Jacques Lacan,Ecrits: Selection, Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 5 D. H. Lawrence, Women Love (New York: Viking, 1961), p. viii. Subin sequent references will be cited parentheticallyin the text as WL.
6

western Univ. Press, 1960). 7 Charles L. Ross, "Homoerotic Feeling in Womenin Love: Lawrence's The for verbal consciousness"in the Manuscripts,in D. H. Lawrence: "struggle Man Who Lived, Papers Delivered at the D. H. Lawrence Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2-5 April 1979, ed. Robert B. Partlaw,Jr. and Harry T. Moore. LadyChatterley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 320. 10Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers,vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 42. 1 The Lettersof D. H. Lawrence,ed. with an introd. by Aldous Huxley (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 86.
8Phoenix, p. 535. 9 George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fictionfrom Frankensteinto

By Eliseo Vivas, in The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Evanston: North-

374

SEX AND LANGUAGE IN LAWRENCE

12 Levine, The Realistic Imagination, pp. 324-28. Levine, of course, cites chap. IX in which Lawrence defends "even satire as a form of sympathy." 13 See, for example, his letters to Frieda in Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence,ed. E. W. Tedlock (London: Heinemann, 1961), pp. 321, 329 ff. 14 James Joyce, Letters,ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 294. 15In Sex, Literature and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York: Twayne, 1953), p. 92. 16 From the essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914), rpt. in Collected Papers, v. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 36. 17 Jeffrey Mehlmhn, "The 'floating signifier': from Levi-Strauss to Lacan," in Yale French Studies, vol. 48 (French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, 1972), p. 19. sJacques Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," in Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Structuralism(Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), p. 130. i9 Kenneth Burke, "Freud-and the Analysis of Poetry," rpt. in Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. William Phillips (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1963), pp. 412-39. 20 The Schreber case is found in vol. XII of the Standard Edition; the delusion entails an alliance with God, who murdered Schreber's soul and used his body like a strumpet (see esp. p. 19). Kafka's gloss is quoted in Ronald Hayman's recent biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 207; it goes like this: God's rage against humanity. The two trees, the unexplained veto, the punishment of all (serpent, Woman and Man), the priority given to Cain, whom He provokes by addressing him. Beckett's play, easily available, dramatizes the effort of the subject ("Mouth") to present herself authentically in the third person.

375