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ALAN FRIEDMAN
everything in his fiction immediately becomes clear, precise, apt, deft
and readable. For instance: "She was perfectly stable in resistance
when she was in this state: so bright and radiant and attractive in
her pure opposition...." "... [tJhe father seemed to breathe an
air
of death, as
if
he were destroyed in his very being...." "They
continued radiant in their easy female transcendancy, beautiful to
look at." All of these, from a single page in
Women in Love,
make
perfect prose and perfect sense. The style is
.a
triumph of rhythm and
diction adjusted to the subject - provided one understands what the
subject
is.
If
one misunderstands, or the moment one forgets, every–
thing alters to the clumsiest jargon of pretentious abstraction. Any
writer who describes the self, the daily self of the daylight world,
as a
girl
perfectly stable in resistance, a man destroyed in
his
very
being, and two sisters radiant in easy female transcendancy, will get
short shrift from me.
As
transcriptions of the Underself, however, as
an attempt to articulate the movements of something by its nature
inarticulate and unarticulable, Lawrence's writing is on the whole
elegant. Referred to the Underself and not to the self, passages that
might otherwise repel grow suddenly luminous and right:
There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at
him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate.
This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment.
And writing which runs roughshod over idiomatic English takes on
surprising impact. (There may be less surprise
if
we consider again
the opposed, limiting case of Joyce's practice. Just as in Joyce ellipti–
cal syntax and the pulverization of words together form a single
technique, so in Lawrence hyperbolic awareness and the fracturing
of idiom form a single technique for conveying unconscious ma–
terial. ) Keeping the Underself in mind, consider for example the
passage in which Gerald pulls off
his
muddy boots and climbs into
Gudrun's bed. "His pure body was almost killed" is not bad writing,
though it is remarkably unidiomatic. "But the miraculous, soft ef–
fluence of her breast suffused over
him"
is not hoarse jargon, though
it shows the invisible visibly. "His brain was hurt, seared, the tissue
was as if destroyed" is not shrill exaggeration of Gerald's condition:
all
three are analogues, subjective correlatives for an unconscious
condition of being.
