«political» trilogy of Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent, from his quest for a better life outside white, European civilization. This division further points up concomitant transformations in his literary technique. Lawrence responded to a wide range of literary influences, ranging from the Bible to Richard Wagner. From George Eliot came the idea of juxtaposing two couples and playing out the tensions between them, a structure used in The White Peacock, Women in Love, and Kangaroo; from James Fenimore Cooper came the melodramatic treatment of the Dark Savage versus the White Man (or White Woman) in The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and stories like 'The Woman Who Rode Away.' Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was simply 'the greatest novel in the world.' But Thomas Hardy must be singled out for special emphasis.
Hardy too came from the English Midlands; his beloved pastoral Derbyshire was subject to as great a cultural, if not industrial, transfor-
-729- mation as was Nottinghamshire in the late nineteenth century. Like Lawrence, Hardy was steeped in Christian scripture from his youth, yet came to believe in the need to recognize the older, more erotic, and more violent pagan gods repressed by Christ's message. (In The Man Who Died [1929], an anti-Christian allegory, Lawrence rewrites the life of Christ in response to this need. In Apocalypse [1931], Lawrence borrows from Nietzsche, Madame Blavatsky, and occultist Frederick Carter to reinterpret the Book of Revelation along similar lines. As in Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, Judeo-Christian tradition now appears to be superimposed on an older mythic cosmology.) Lawrence and Hardy shared a decided hatred of modernity's hypocrisy and a profound love of nature. But Lawrence was satisfied neither with the finality of Hardy's tragic vision nor with his more conventional moralism.
Lawrence played down Hardy's documentary naturalism and emphasized the mythic forces just below the surface of his prose. The language of The White Peacock magnifies a personal sympathy with nature, in part because-unlike any of his succeeding ones-this first novel is written in the first person. Lawrence draws his narrator so transparently that the significance of the flora and fauna seems like a massive projection of the author himself. 'I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond,' the novel opens. 'They were grey, descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty. The whole place was gathered in the musing of old age.' Yet Lawrence's representation of the valley of «Nethermere» is more than just bad aestheticism. It is a sustained attempt to give voice to the nonhuman world, to read the book of nature as if what were written there needed no human mind to give it meaning.
The White Peacock is about George Saxton, a passionate but uneducated farmer who is unable to consummate a relationship with the more cultured Lettie, sister of narrator Cyril Beardsall (who carries Lydia Lawrence's surname). George finds pleasure in Lettie's and Cyril's company, but winds up marrying the vulgar Meg, and slowly disintegrates in liquor and disease. Though formulaic, the novel is nonetheless striking for a carnivalesque episode recounting the welcome death of the narrator's estranged father. Moreover, it contains in muted form gestures that would later be expanded: immersion in nature to heal damaged sensation; homoerotic contact to heal a damaged sensuality; and the archetypal Lawrentian story of class and gender struggle in -730- gamekeeper Annable's first marriage to the spiritual Lady Crystabel (the White Peacock of the title), which only produces, as the 'woman's paper she subscribed to' puts it, 'an unfortunate misalliance.'
Like the Wagnerian Liebestod played out by the unhappily married Siegmund and his student Helena in The Trespasser, The White Peacock is methodical in its effect. Lawrence skirts the boundaries of the sensationalism associated with popular culture and ridiculed by high modernism. Indeed, Kate Millett decried the kitschy vulgarity of Lawrence's presentation of sexuality almost as much as his regressive sexual politics. Yet Lawrence quite consciously embraces here, for example, what John Ruskin had earlier criticized as the 'pathetic fallacy,' or unwarranted anthropomorphism. The opening line of part 2 of The White Peacock-'Winter lay a long time prostrate on the earth'-is in one sense simply immature writing. But equally inflated diction occurs throughout even his best work. Lawrence's is in fact an aesthetic of vulgarity-as The Plumed Serpent's Western-style shoot-out and its lake of 'flimsy, soft, sperm-like water… the lymphatic milk of fishes' will illustrate.
Like his pseudophilosophy and his pseudopsychology, Lawrence's prose depends on extravagance, and it begins with his mode of composition. Lawrence rarely just edited his work in the conventional sense of the term-he rewrote things wholesale, sometimes as many as six or seven times. Precisely because neither the word nor the book was sacred by comparison to the flesh-an attitude contradicting certain Christian and modernist hermeneutics-language was always expendable. He wrote as if the only way to fill his words with authentic feeling was to bring them to a metaphorical and rhythmic intensity that risked sliding into the bathos of mass culture that he derided as well. Lawrence set himself the daunting task of verbalizing a sublime 'struggle into conscious being' (as in the foreword to Women in Love) in a world that he believed had degraded being to mere verbal performance, and of doing so with tools-words-that increasingly appeared to be so much intellectual machinery. The frequent scenes of wordless physicality in Lawrence, like his interest in telepathic communication, testify clearly enough that language was itself the most intransigent barrier to the aims of his art. 'It must happen beyond the sound of words,' Rupert tells Ursula in Women in Love. On some level, Lawrence knew that his writing might only perpetuate the verbal consciousness he intended it to resist. -731-
With the second phase of his work, The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence abandoned both the romance and the realism of earlier efforts. In an oft-cited letter of June 5, 1914, to Edward Garnett, Lawrence answered some of his mentor's stylistic objections to an early version of The Rainbow called 'The Wedding Ring.' Lawrence makes qualified connections between his own aims and Marinetti's futurist explorations of what is «non- human» in humanity; he rejects the 'moral scheme' into which realism's characters are still forced to fit-even the extraordinary heroes of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky-as something 'dull, old, dead… You musn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.' Though he would continue to rewrite his novel, these remarks point to significant departures.
First, rather than continuing to accommodate readers' objections that his characters seem indistinguishable from one another, Lawrence would simply reject expectations shaped by nineteenth-century realism. Though assuming superficially different profiles-different allotropes-each of his characters was in fact composed of the same substance, and it was the novel's new task to reveal that substance and the essential, nonsynchronous dualisms within it opposing blood and mind, male and female, law and love, stasis and motility. (This assault on the conventionally individualized ego is hardly unique to Lawrence, however; using a rather different vocabulary, Virginia Woolf would question nineteenth-century notions of character in similar ways.) The sometimes cloying repetitions of Lawrence's writing from this period-'the pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination' (from the foreword to Women in Love) — are an attempt to mimic the flows of nonhuman instinct rather than conscious intellect.
Second, the extravagance of his prose would no longer be reined in, as language still is in Hardy, by the need to make moral evaluations. The narrative could range beyond conventional notions of good and evil to conjure up the nonhuman element of human experience. Third, and increasingly in the novels from Aaron's Rod on, fiction would tend to be subordinated to predetermined typologies and pseudophilosophical imperatives-though Lawrence had claimed the reverse as his priority. -732-
Women in Love, for most of Lawrence's critics, has been the novel that best carries out the first and second of the above aims while avoiding the worst pitfalls of the third. Ursula Brangwen, well past her ordeal with Anton Skrebensky in The Rainbow, is joined by her more cosmopolitan sister Gudrun, just back from art school in London, and they are soon paired with Rupert Birkin, inspector of schools, and Gerald Crich, heir to his father's mining company. There is now a modernist quality to the prose, though it remains unmistakably Lawrence's; it is more dramatic than descriptive, as the characters struggle with what Lawrence called 'unborn needs and fulfilment.' There is also a thinness to their 'allotropic states,' and an insistent similarity in the conflicts facing them. Lawrence suggests almost nothing of Ursula's and Gudrun's prior lives, and only as much about Gerald Crich as will enable the reader to identify him as Cain-like (he has accidentally killed his brother). The violent hatred between Rupert and Hermione is more or less incomprehensible on first reading, so little is revealed about its causes.
Moreover, the narrative is less a Stendhalian mirror traveling the road of life's superficial continuities than a series of attempts to penetrate the tired, mechanical allotropes of putatively realistic storytelling. Scene after scene is devoted to the same act of discovery, the same effort to plunge to the nonhuman depths of 'underworld knowledge': Rupert's argument with Hermione over education in chapter 3, the play of the cats in chapter 8, the disastrous water party and failed rescue in chapter 14, the «rabbit-mad» violence in chapter 18, the homoerotic
