Lawrence's Fiction: Gadfly to the World

42 REVIEWS 1. Lawrence's Fiction: Gadfly to the World Eugene Goodheart. THE UTOPIAN VISION OF D. H. LAWRENCE, Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1963. $5.00. Books on the contradictory but stimulating ideas of D. H. Lawrence by now are spilling off the shelves. Being so willing to turn away from the story to lecture the reader, Lawrence too often distracts his critics from his tales in order to heatedly refute or defend their teller. Lawrence, of course, also invites such treatment through his embodiment of idea in character, and his use of the novel as a weapon — a bomb, he called it — against accepted ideas. In THE UTOPIAN VISION OF D. H. UlJRENCE, Eugene Goodheart presents yet another discussion of Lawrence's ideas, and his unconventional modes of presenting them. Goodheart studies Lawrence's essays and novels together for their important themes, concentrating upon placing Lawrence in the important yet heretical tradition of Blake and Nietzsche, those other creators of striking parables so much against the grain of their times. These comparisons have often been made, and Lawrence's rightful place in this personalist category has also often been insisted upon. Yet Goodheart knows his material well, and brings the parallels together to make insights that are both thoughtful and succinct. The book is thus useful for the interested reader who has read some of these remarkable fictions, has had his fill of lurid biography, and now wishes to see Lawrence in relation to the culture of his time, and to consider some of the disturbing questions Lawrence as novelist poses. And Goodheart raises questions that are often more interesting than his conclusions. In his mature work Lawrence was not interested in creating character in the way of traditional fiction, deeply rooted in a particular set of social circumstances. But Goodheart is perceptive to enough to indicate that Lawrence's new way of character depiction — his ¡magistic portrayal of "allotropie" passions that move men beyond the motives of time and place — is finally a negation of the individuality of civilized man, and the extinction of his novel as well. This tension between man — the Laurentian hero — and the world is never resolved in Lawrence's novels; but It is not, of course, resolved in our society. This Is one of the many conflicts that make Lawrence's work so significant for the understanding of our world, and is a tension that still calls for explication and evaluation. Lawrence did not want to create new myth or to rediscover old to remake the world; he wished, says Goodheart, to "reawaken the mythical consciousness" by creating anew our sense of place, of people and of life. But entirely too often, Goodheart observes, he seems to be forcing language to create what language cannot; his lush imagery "often renders his meaning intellectually and emotionally inaccessible." Thus "the conflict between the Laurentian hero and the world Is too often resolved by abolishing the world." Yet, Goodheart concludes that only Hardy is close to Lawrence in portraying a "vivic apprehension of man and nature as a living continuum." Goodheart thus Insists upon maintaining an ambivalent attitude toward Lawrence, the maker of fiction. Lawrence himself advised us to trust the tale, never the teller. In his perceptive consideration of Lawrence's dominant themes, Goodheart reminds us that with Lawrence teller and tale are so blended that further caution 43 is necessary. Like Blake and Nietzsche, Goodheart concludes, Lawrence is an artist "beyond good and evil," whose blend of brilliant, intuitive vision and irritating, cross-patch utopianism compels both "our admiration and our mistrust." In thus focusing upon the problem of relating Lawrence to the central stream of our fiction, Goodheart makes at least this reader aware of how much needs to be done to show the nature of the achievement of Lawrence's fiction. We have all, I think, had enough about Lawrence's homemade philosophy and its shortcomings, and more than enough about his obsession with sex and his propensity for Fascism. Lawrence is simultaneously one of the most original and one of the most obfuscating creators of important fiction in the twentieth century. The nature of this achievement, with its blend of...