ALAN FRIEDMAN
human psyche which shall
be
other than human, at once less and
more than human - extrahuman. And the search is maintained at
such a pressure that its power becomes almost that of a natural force.
Moonlight and coaldust, the wind in the ash tree, the drop of moth–
er's blood that falls on a baby's hair, William's coffin and Paul's
pneumonia, the plucking of flowers, the dancing of a "big red
beast"
of a stallion, the "blind and ruthless" hot blood-bath of sex - for
Lawrence these are not merely embodiments and vehicles of meaning.
They are the terms of a fate that drives his people and
his
plot–
physical terms, finally, rather than psychological terms - a startling
attitude toward the human psyche which, by the time he came to
write
The Rainbow
he made fully explicit.
In a celebrated letter to his editor, Edward Garnett, Lawrence
explained provocatively that in creating character in fiction, what
now fascinated him was a part of the human self that was "non-hu–
man" - "that which is physic" - a region of the psyche which
functioned apart from the moral, consistent, stable, individual ego,
a level of character at which "the individual is unrecognizable." To
put the matter recognizably, before James Joyce and by a different
method, after Freud but by a different avenue, Lawrence attempted
a direct literary rendering of his characters' unconscious. From th«:
first character on the first page of
The Rainbow
who is "aware of
something standing above him and beyond him in the distance," to
Ursula and her communion with a rainbow on the last page, the
inner, unknown reality of the Underself becomes for Lawrence a
technical quest. And the quest proceeds physically: a physical base
for the unconscious.
It should be evident that when I speak of mapping and tracing
the regions below consciousness, I am speaking of a literary render–
ing, not of a usable theoretical construct which can
be
separated
from the fiction. The problem of course is that Lawrence fancied
himself a doctor of the mind. And in the old days a large part of
the interest his fans took in
his
fiction was generated by
his
theoriz–
ing - a rhetoric of novel notions that flooded out over the notional
novels into essays, tracts and utopian schemes. However annoying
his stance in some of these programmatic statements, still, it is worth
noticing that beneath every verdict and sneer, beneath even
his
of–
fensive and impractical politics, lay
his
theory of the psyche.
