250
ALAN FRIEDMAN
closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and
further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her,
till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion the quick of all her
plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation
was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and
she was born: a woman.
And the repetitions in the following passage - the private ritual of
Anna's dancing, big with child and naked, upon whose privacy her
husband accidentally intrudes - have the same hypnotic function:
And she lifted her hands and danced again, to annul
him,
the light
glanced on her knees as she made her slow, fine movements down
the far side of the room, across the firelight. He stood away near
the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with
slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a
full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before
the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself to the
Lord, to exultation.
How wonderful to remember that
this
passage, with its mysterious
religious suggestiveness, was one of those that aroused judicial im–
patience and led to the banning of the book in 1915. The accuracy
of the censors
is
worth noticing: without knowing it, looking for
obscenity, they found the essential Lawrence. For he was surely cor–
rect in asserting that sex
is
the port of entry into the unconscious
mystery. And
it
was perfectly just too that Joyce's experiment with
other regions of the great continents below consciousness should
also
have brought him directly into conflict with the censors on the
same issue of sexual obscenity. For both writers, freedom to travel
in the hinterlands of consciousness involved the right-of-entry into
the port.
Lawrence's technique, however, is more than a matter of dic–
tion, rhythm, location and focus. He composes his scenes with a
fluent and uncanny narrative movement that
is
worth examination
in detail. Passages which suggest the upward rush of unconscious
perception into consciousness often occur in separate paragraphs, or
in sentences which stand out, identifiably "different" in their con–
texts. But many of the processes occurring below the threshold
of
