PARTISAN REVIEW
243
company. The swift hop of the paper reminded
him
she was gone.
But he had been with her. He wanted everything to stand still, so
that he could be with her again.
Searching high and low,
his
novels, unlike the essays, search long
and
well.
And it is here, at the parallels with Freudian analysis, that I
wish
to pause. Everywhere in the novels they suggest themselves ir–
resistibly and should
be
resisted. Moving on parallel lines, perhaps
, Lawrence and Freud will meet at infinity. Meanwhile, I pause to
note that the shape of things Lawrence finds in the regions below
consciousness -
... the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes of
wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels .•.
- have heavenly differences from the shapes Freud is disposed to
find: "shadow-shapes of the angels" do not wheel for Freud's un–
conscious. Lawrence's point in the passage above from
The Rainbow
is just that, and in
Fantasia of the Unconscious,
he spelled it out
specifically: "What Freud says is always
partly
true." While Lawr–
ence's unconscious therefore - that is, the dimension of the fictional
Underself he creates - includes many of the things we might ex–
pect to find in Freud's unconscious, it includes a great many things
besides: "a powerful wave of mounting blood" and "the strange
and moonlike intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral
ganglion." But more interesting than the differences between the
novelist and the psychologist is the difference between Lawrence as
novelist and Lawrence as psychologist. His friendliest critics have long
been at pains to confess that the slow shuttling of passions back and
forth in
Sons and Lovers
among Paul Morel,
his
mother and his two
young women produces an explicit psychological context that is not
satisfactorily presented in psychological terms - despite the author's
lengthy expository efforts - and yet is perfectly generated by non–
rational vision and by physical details. The author's method is
naturalistic; his eye painterly; his intent psychological. But beneath
this conventionally crowded human surface his novel has another
life. The reader is taken along on an expedition (non-Freudian
in
Sons and Lovers,
later anti-Freudian) hunting for a map of the
