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D.H Lawrence narrators, sources of knowledge, and the problem of coherence

Readers of D. H. Lawrence have long been intrigued by the quality and texture of his prose. Its complex fragmentation has elicited widespread comment; its linguistic challenges are critical commonplaces. As part of what remains to be done, I want to examine Lawrence's use of fictional narrators and to focus on two related problems that it creates: the problem of coherence and, below that, the problem of the text's sources of knowledge. Analysis of Lawrence's narrators reveals that problems of coherence can be traced to his use of various narrative voices, and that these various voices depend on assumptions about his sources of knowledge which require careful scrutiny. My aim is to look across the wide span of Lawrence's fiction; to identify a line of technical development; to situate that line within the context of published criticism, both theoretical and practical, occasionally challenging received critical views; and, finally, as I reconsider some central passages in the Lawrence canon, to reach fresh conclusions about narrative coherence, sources of knowledge, and Lawrence's narrators.

This cluster of concepts has attracted extensive commentary, most of it designed to help readers understand Lawrence's characters and themes. Such understanding is not my purpose. Whereas Keith Sagar, Mark Spilka, and Stephen Miko regard Lawrence's narrators as vehicles of information or interpretation rather than as difficult constructs in the text, contemporary critics have located the sources of Lawrence's imaginative power in his highly developed intuitive and sensory equipment,(1) in his adaptation of the carnivalesque,(2) or in his ability to "transcode" experience,(3) and they have derived his conception of knowledge from biblical typology,(4) from Romantic poetry,(5) or from Aestheticism.(6) Diane Bonds understands this cluster of concepts as a narratological problem: but her deconstructive insights, though penetrating, are confined to the subversive features of Lawrence's texts.(7) The philosophical and narratological connections between narrators, knowledge, and coherence remain therefore to be defined. I anticipate that some of my distinctions may help to refine a critical method--rhetorical in origin, comparative in application--for negotiating the vexingly difficult bond between narrator and character.

Two related issues require at least preliminary comment. First, the notion of coherence as an aesthetic aim was beginning to be challenged by many early-Modernist writers. Marcel Proust, for example, analyzing Ruskin's criticism, wrote: "Apparently he moves at random from one idea to the next. But in truth the imagination which guides him follows his deepest inclinations, which impose on him a superior logic in spite of himself--so much so that, at the end, he finds he has obeyed a hidden plan which, when it is finally unveiled, imposes in retrospect a kind of order on the whole."(3) Such deeper patterns of coherence, lying below the level of conscious planning or structuring, reveal the structural components of intuition as they manifest themselves in narrative choices.

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Other interesting articles about D.H.L: 1, 2

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Academic year 2008/2008
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Carlos Añó Ochoa
Universitat de València Press
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