Two on Lawrence

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 wrong, about sex or power or life in general, than with his unique gifts as a showman in art," we may object to the rhetorical sleight of hand. In "Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin: Lawrence and Dialogic Fiction," Lodge concedes that such ploys often amount to "a rather convenient 'loophole' . . . through which writers not obviously recognizable as carnivalesque, such as Dostoevski and Lawrence, can nevertheless be accommodated with that tradition. . . ." It is a shortcoming that Lodge himself does not altogether escape here. The critic who seems most fully aware of the pros and cons of a "dialogic" approach is Fleishman, whose "Lawrence and Bakhtin: Where Pluralism Ends and Dialogism Begins" is the most probing and suggestive essay of the lot. Fleishman manages to avoid the defensiveness implicit in several other "dialogic" attempts at absolving Lawrence from responsibility for his discomfiting doctrines. He asks: How can the dialogical approach to Lawrence help to exonerate him from charges of dogmatic posing, authorial intervention or "monological" novel writing, and yet avoid relegating his outbursts of authorial assertion to the margins? Like them or not, they make up a large chunk of Women in Love and, I would submit, a measure of its greatness. What I wish to urge is that these apparently monological passages are themselves governed by the operations of dialogic writing. I found Fleishman's demonstration of this Bakhtinian concept of "double voiced" writing as it operates in Women in Love rigorous and impressive. It would seem, then, that for the time being at least the most fruitful lines of inquiry for those who feel the need to rethink Lawrence in light of contemporary theory are the feminist, the new historicist, and the dialogical approaches. But I also suspect that Janet Barron is quite correct when she concludes that "Feminist criticism, and criticism generally, has not quite got Lawrence right yet; our analyses still distort as often as they identify." The challenge of pursuing Lawrence's "thought-adventures" remains as daunting as ever. Ronald G. Walker Western Illinois University Two on Lawrence Tony Pinkney. D. H Lawrence and Modernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. χ + 180 pp. Cloth $25.00 Paper $10.95 James C. Cowan. D. H Lawrence and the TremblingBalance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. xii + 306 pp. $25.00 PlNKNEY's slim blue paperback—no nonsense, just a small reproduc406 BOOK REVIEWS tion of Lyonel Feininger's energetic woodcut, The Cathedral of Socialism , on the front—contrasts amusingly with the dust jacket of Cowan's chunky hardback on which Lawrence's own portrait of a naked and muscular Italian peasant, seated, with a hint of genitalia at the bottom, is set in a rather fancy imitation of a black leather album cover obscurely suggesting further revelations within. Each, in its way, lives up to its promise. Tony Pinkney, a lecturer at the University of Lancaster who has written Women in the Poetry of T S. Eliot and edits News From Nowhere, offers a lively, sophisticated, Marxist examination of D. H. Lawrence's "literary project" in its contribution to the "unending struggle against classicism." Classicism (upper-middle classicism) in its cool assumption of superiority to mass culture is purveyed by Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Matthew Arnold, and in the twentieth century by their successors, the Modernists. The classicist, ideal, Arnoldian "best self" "peers scornfully down on the provincial 'ordinary self it has left behind." Pinkney argues this is so even in the "English Realist" novels of George Eliot, which appear to be exclusively concerned with provincial life, but whose narrator looks down from a classical height imposing her own normative morality. The classical perspective is manifest in this century in the "modernist motifs of impersonality, hardness, objectivity," the modern equivalents of the traditional classicist ideals, "austerity and universality ." D. H. Lawrence and Modernism examines the way in which Lawrence takes on the forces of classicizing modernism, succumbs to them, and with notable exceptions fights on the wrong side thereafter. Thus The White Peacock, after appearing to be about to "inaugurate a new genre of 'proletarian realism,'" falls victim to its George Eliotic formula (two couples) and becomes "the first imagist novel"; while The...