Lawrence, Plato, Bloom

BOOK REVIEWS identity and community. Although each of the selves or characters has chosen (or is inscribed by) a conventional life pattern, a symbolic structure that seems not to challenge prevailing gender myths, yet the style and form of this novel imply a large reservoir of "inner speech," to use Bakhtin's term. The unconscious speech, and in fact the consciousness, of the characters provide for each of them a broad and varied resource. By far the most innovative and interesting move Little makes in The Experimental Self is the inclusion of Pym in this trio of women experimental writers. Woolf and Brooke-Rose have often been linked together in a tradition of experimental writing-whether the latter is defined as oppositional or as "appositional" and dialogic, as Little would prefer. But to approach Pym with this kind of interest in her dialogic textualization of ordinary life, and to place her work on a continuum with that of writers such as Woolf and Brooke-Rose, breaks down the conventional opposition between realism and experimental writing. It forces us, quite usefully, to recognize the limitations of this particular critical paradigm. I have never before quoted a book jacket in writing a review, but in this case I must make an exception to that general rule. For I find myself in complete agreement with Mark Hussey's back-cover blurb assessing Little's study: "The Experimental Self draws on a sophisticated theoretical apparatus without that apparatus ever intruding on the most pleasurable aspect of this text: its lucid readings of the fiction. The book is superbly written, very clearly organized, and always accessible. .. . [It] is a model of how to write criticism that draws upon theories that are not specifically literary yet have clear implications for our understanding of the act of reading." Ann Ardis ________________ University of Delaware Lawrence, Plato, Bloom Barry J. Scherr. D. H Lawrence's Response to Plato: A Bloomian Interpretation . New York: Peter Lang, 1996. viii + 191 pp. $39.95 BARRY SCHERR'S STUDY offers an argument for Lawrence's greatness as a writer by reference to Harold Bloom's concept of the strong poet. Lawrence's various self-aggrandizing gestures, solipsisms, and doctrinal absolutisms are revalorized as necessary components of the strong poetic identity. Thus, "the 'immortality' in which Lawrence is so intensely interested is in fact the 'poetic immortality' privileged by Harold Bloom in his literary theory" (14). So Scherr inscribes Lawrence 243 ELT 41 : 2 1998 within a Western tradition of literary/philosophical agonism extending back to the Father figure of Plato. Connecting Lawrence to Plato is a pleasantly audacious gambit. Given the breadth of Lawrence's various mentions of and allusions to the Greek philosopher, this focus responds to a large gap in Lawrence criticism. Scherr argues that at the climax of The Rainbow, the horses that taunt Ursula are significantly and consciously prefigured by the good and bad horses of the chariot of the soul in the Phaedrus. Following Bloomian protocol, Scherr draws out Lawrence's "misprisions" of Plato's text, especially his heterosexualist misreading of the significance of Plato's presentation of homoeroticism. While offering to correct that misreading (whether his correction is correct is another matter), Scherr credits Lawrence's resistance of Plato's cultural authority as a crucial component of his own creativity. Scherr's discussion of the Platonic milieu does help to clarify certain textual points, such as the extent to which Lawrence's "flux of corruption" is a covert signification for homosexual behaviors that disturbed his relations to idealist philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and other of Lawrence's Cambridge connections . However, and especially unfortunate in a critical study of Lawrence, Scherr is blithely oblivious to the extreme masculinism embedded in Bloom's critical system. As far back as volume 1 of No Man's Land, Gilbert and Gubar demonstrated how to deflect Bloom's gender biases toward liberal-feminist ends, but there's no mention of them or any other feminist scholar, except, in one footnote, when Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir are briefly decried. Scherr's study amounts to a retrograde attempt, by means of an already fading critical system, to ignore several decades...