Notes on the modern period - 28 - D. H. Lawrence's version of modernism

I want to explore here the contrast between Lawrence’s characters and those created by the other modern British novelists I admire – Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf. The characters created by the latter are presented with what I want to call a nurturing detachment; even as these characters intimately implicate their creators (Joyce’s Stephen and Bloom, or Conrad’s Marlow, or Woolf’s Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay), the sympathy – which infuses the presentation of each of these central characters – is inevitably accompanied by irony, shaping and sculpting the novels’ “reality.” The irony is sometimes structural, as in the stark and bracing transitions from chapter to chapter in Joyce’s Portrait; sometimes the ironies expose limits and contradictions, as in Marlow’s protesting that he has no gift for language; or at times, there are ironic collisions among points of view (as when Mr. Ramsay’s tortured self-importance is observed with sudden objectivity by another character, in the brilliant heartbreaking counterpoint of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse).

Modern novelists radically adapt the inheritance of nineteenth century realism, accentuating the sympathetic inward views and the detached irony essential to the novel form. About their intensified rendering of inwardness, there is modern novelists’ evocation of the inner stream of thought and feeling. About their radical irony, suffice it to say that these novelists observe their characters’ lives as part of a vision of collapse – of self, of society, of civilization itself.

Now, in these terms, Lawrence certainly qualifies as a “modernist.” His final book of prose is titled Apocalypse, his portrait of modern society is in a word satiric, and his rendering of the inner flow of feeling is lyrically intense. However, Lawrence’s version of the modern differs from Conrad’s, Joyce’s, and Woolf’s. His image-filled, incantatory lyricism renders or, better, embraces his characters as a life-or-death matter; his storytelling is continually an act of celebration or excoriation, of affirmation or admonishment – in short, a sometimes manic, even desperate sort of persuasion. It is not simply that there are passages in his novels which read as passionate persuasive essays (remember Woolf’s pages attacking “Proportion” and its murderous sister “Conversion” at the center of Mrs. Dalloway, and of course her prose is also highly lyrical). Lawrence’s difference from her and the other moderns is that all features of his fiction – narrative voice, structure, the feelings and actions of his characters – implore us to embrace or object to what we read; the fiction performs an act of advocacy, aiming to impel us to act, to feel actively – not to sympathize but to love, not to detach but to censure. This characterization is itself not meant as censure; it’s an indication of the mixed feelings Lawrence’s works stirs not only in me.

Though his plots and men and women he creates may be Hardyesque, Lawrence’s novels are themselves like Dostoyevskian characters, insisting you listen to his upwelling narrative and intent on contacting your very soul. The intensity of the encounter can feel as vital as lived experience, as the “dialogic” contact we witness in scene after scene of a Dostoyevsky novel. But it can also fail to realize the potential power of such contact, of the living encounter, for Lawrence’s reader feels sometimes that she or he has been gripped by a needful imperious being, who requires acquiescence to his unitary vision and voice. Dostoyevsky’s primary allegiance is to pitting characters against each other in those scenes of contact that capture what is at risk in actual experience, and his genius is in the masterful polyphony which results. In these terms, Lawrence often falls short: he yearns to capture the very pith and essence of experience, yet what often emerges is another sort of power, a stream of lyric vision rather than the agon and process of experience in which characters are tested.

An example occurs in the compelling early chapter “Breadalby” in Women in Love. Here we find acidly satiric portraits of British intellectuals partying at an estate belonging to Hermione, who is about to part ways dramatically with her lover. He is Rupert, one of the four major protagonists in the novel. As the dramatic moment approaches, the dialogue between them is abstract rather than revealing, monologue-like rather than “dialogic.” Rupert rather rants: “I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity.” In response to this – her lover’s self-isolating abstractions – Hermione rather goes mad: “Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling water.” Such states of feeling eddy through and around the two characters, and their agonized struggle is evoked with effusive lyricism, but often without a compelling sense of what is motivating these two toward the following intense confrontation: “swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel [lapis] stone with all her force, crash on his head.”

The hurt, dazed Rupert walks out of Hermione’s mansion into the countryside; in a flight of poetic imagination, Lawrence imagines him taking off his clothes and making a sort of love to the flowers and grass, apparently without sexual arousal lying on his belly in the primrose and hyacinths and wet grass – “he seemed to saturate himself with their contact…and then to sting one’s thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs. Naked and almost blanked out, Rupert seems to be starting out from the beginning to rebuild a self and a consciousness, from almost perversely rudimentary elements of nature and experience. Soon bits of his previous rant return, but they are subordinate now to the sacramental effusion of the prose poetry: “he was weary of the old ethic, of the human being, and of humanity. He loved now the soft, delicate vegetation, that was so cool and perfect.” In the most searching passages of Women in Love, the narrative struggles to perform with lyrical, incantatory urgency a sacramental evocation of its characters’ deeply intimate states of feeling: “nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it.”

Throughout his literary career, Lawrence was a practicing poet, whose poetry was a constant accompaniment to his fiction writing. His pleasure in writing a poem is partly a matter of his faith that the poem itself becomes the heartbreaking music of the piano or the grandeur of the snake or the succulence of the fig: the poem’s voice becomes the font of beauty. It is meant to bring forth what he would call the god-like presence of realized beauty. In his poetic version of modern fiction, Lawrence aims to perform just this sacrament in his stories and novels; their repeated images become incantations – as if there, on the page, the miraculous birth of feeling is performed. His finest novels become an amalgam of that hallowing and of the characters who crave such sacrament, yet who struggle in confusion, searching and partial. It is Lawrence’s insight and insistence that even partial, modern human beings can yet begin to contact that miraculous font.

Sacramental transformation is the subject of the final pages of the prose work I mentioned earlier, Apocalypse (his last work, written in 1929). Since my previous post, I’ve been thinking about the similarities between the ideas in that late essay and the core ideas in Walter Benjamin’s first book, written in 1925, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. That will be the subject of my next post.

Here are links for you to examine some of the texts I mentioned above: Apocalypse (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), Women in Love (Penguin Popular Classics)

Notes on the modern period - 22 - Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"

Of the many possible approaches to discussing Woolf’s novels, some concern her portrayal of men and women, her vision of “moments of being,” her ways of rendering characters’ consciousness, and her understanding of how art infuses and illuminates lives. In my earlier posts on modern fiction, I have emphasized a sort of gigantism both of modern novelists’ ambitions and of their created characters’ selves, in the face of modernity’s paradoxical combination of enormous growth and encompassing disillusionment, due in part to the Great War’s millions of lives lost. That sense of the modern novel as a process of “magnification” is evident in Woolf’s work; I’ll be focusing my comments here on her most developed novel after Mrs. Dalloway (1925): the great To the Lighthouse, published in 1927 (her fine 1931 novel, The Waves, resonates with similar themes though it is perhaps less realized “as a novel” than the earlier two). In many respects, both of these later novels are acts of mourning and, in a sense, homages to her late parents in the 1927 novel and to her late brother in The Waves.

To the Lighthouse is dominated by three characters – Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. There are many subordinate characters (the Ramsay children, friends of the family, etc.), but the moments of deepest vision and richest human contact involve those three characters in one way or another. Both women are artists, Lily literally and Mrs. Ramsay in terms of her shaping of the human relations around her and also her imaginative sensitivity and receptivity. Both characters are, in different ways, attuned to the neediness of Mr. Ramsay and the other male characters, though Lily explicitly rejects the “angel in the house” role of bolstering and soothing the male ego and compensating for instances of male sterility (for example, Charles Tansley’s insecure and compensating ego). Mrs. Ramsay, in contrast, triumphs in precisely those activities, certainly in protecting the bright but poverty-stricken Charles and particularly with regard to her husband, Mr. Ramsay, but Mrs. Ramsay does so as part of the larger project of nurturing all the humans connected to her, male and female alike, so that falsifying Victorian sexual politics seem to have loosed its grip on her. The novel's great example of her project is her family dinner, exactly at the center of the novel, where boeuf en daub is served and each member and guest is made to feel part of the living continuum of human relations she “orchestrates.”

Central – and thrilling – in this novel, however, is Mrs. Ramsay’s imaginative self-consciousness and self-accounting; these reveries loom and envelop the first half of the novel, a wonderful instance of Woolf’s magnifying a character’s consciousness into a “giant in time.” Images of death repeatedly register in her consciousness as do images of living possibility (along with those of thwarting chaos and failures to communicate). The imagery which embodies these perceptions shoot through her magnified consciousness, and they are additionally remarkable for being unwittingly shared by Lily, the also self-searching summer guest who is painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay.

This shared imagery within the enveloping consciousness of each character establishes an unconscious connection among Woolf’s main characters, often independent of class, gender, or role: an “underground” structure of shared humanity, which is in part Woolf’s modernist response to the pervasiveness of alienation and death in the period.  For example, there are the waves Mrs. Ramsay hears, which “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.” Soon Lily sees “the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves…[where] behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water.” Later, when Mr. Ramsay stands there demanding “sympathy,” Mrs. Ramsay “seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her [knitting] again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself.” Later still Mrs. Ramsay senses “dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came to this” exhaustion she now feels; this occurs just before Lily sees the family before her “like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”

This shared imagery helps to unify the novel’s unfolding structure of consciousness, or rather its process by which each character's consciousness is unfurled and displayed in all its rich verbal tapestry. (As you can see from the clash of terms, temporal and spatial dimensions face off against each other in this novel, so that in the second part of the novel, images of time’s action devastate both character and plot.) The culmination of the imagery woven through the novel’s first hundred and twenty pages occurs when Lily attempts to complete the portrait, she searches for some representation of Mrs. Ramsay’s “unity,” her capacity to compose all their lives, and she paints a dark “triangular purple shape” to balance the composition. This image is echoed at the end of the evening, when Mrs. Ramsay wants finally “to be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” Then she looks out at the lighthouse, responsive to the light from it, the plan to visit it, the living promise of the visit.

The novel’s imagery, then, takes up entire lives – of Mrs. Ramsay and all who surround her – and helps to transform them into a beautifully unified composition. Of course, not only the imagery works in this way, for the internal monologues which bear the images within them are themselves flowing and brilliant constructs, great envelopes of self-critical awareness, as we’ve seen. (Woolf portrays Mr. Ramsay himself as a scathingly self-critical consciousness; the noted philosopher struggles against the failure of reason to account for existence. The results are his piteousness and his bitterness and even his refusal to take his son James to the Lighthouse the next morning.)

Of course, the visit does not occur that morning. In fact, the novel’s first part – “The Window,” with its domestic vantage point – gives way to the short, abrupt “Time Passes,” which in twenty pages chronicles the abandonment of the summer house in the following years. The sentences here contain clipped, abrupt phrases of turbulence and grief interspersed with terse, bracketed announcements of death [Mrs. Ramsay’s, their newly married daughter Prue’s, and in World War I, their son Andrew’s]. Time becomes a ruthless character in this second part of the novel; it is as if the richly composed first part of the novel were a fending off of time and death, “magnified,” shot through with premonition, yet a beautifully constructed oasis nonetheless.

“The Lighthouse,” the seventy-page third and final part of the novel, narrates the return of what remains of the family to the summer house, and it focuses on Lily Briscoe’s effort to confront the loss of Mrs. Ramsay and the grip death has on them all. She realizes both that sympathy might remedy their grief and that life and art, too, are nakedly vulnerable to the “waves,” to the reality of death. By the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsay, too, faces that vulnerability to an empty lonely universe. And on the sailboat finally nearing the lighthouse, he and his son James and his daughter Cam witness the fisherman’s son holding up a caught fish, mutilated and alive. Each character in this section is “extraordinarily exposed” to reality, and each faces how both violence and beauty can flash forth from ordinary experience. Here is Lily’s vision by the end of the novel: “to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” The huge infusion of imaginative consciousness achieved by Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a struggling yet beautifully composed and partly sacramental response of modern art to the modern period’s terrible disclosure that the world of things, like the world of people, is potentially a dead world. Here's a link to the novel: To the Lighthouse (and to The Waves).