D.H. Lawrence: The Cosmic Adventure, Studies of His Ideas, Works, and Literary Relationships ed. by Lawrence Gamache, Phyllis Perrakis (review)

300 LETTERS IN CANADA focllsed on the of translation vouloir ret)roauue sa conscience creatrice?' and 'En l'ecriture existe-t-elle en Simon asks the kinds of that Lawrence Gamache and The Cosmic Studies Ch2lptE:r nea(J.mlgs in a on transJlahon who nonetheless shares a ............T"'J.,.. to the immense aoof(}ac:h is fresh and "01:7011......""" in resembles a miniature it makes for in leaves the reader paper This collection contains sixteen essays based on ......"'·.....0'...'" pres:entea Fifth Lawrence Lontf~re]1Ce HUMANITIES 301 others have insights to offer. An egregious exception is 'Modernist Dialogics of Form in The Rainbow' by Joan Douglas Peters. She purports to bring news from 'the larger field of modernist criticism,' a light to lighten the benighted world of 'even the most sophisticated Lawrencian scholarship today,' which remains nevertheless unsophisticated in the matter of Lawrence's 'narrational use of language.' Sheclaims, and her audience was surely very surprised to hear, that the conception of Lawrence as 'a singlevoiced metaphysician,' the 'dark priest,' still 'flourishes' in that world. The alleged darkness does not exist; the light is no light. Peters simply applies a prefabricated thought-model, made up ofBakhtin's 'structural metaphysics ' and the practices of 'metafiction,' with facile efficiency. The most damaging disproof of her allegation is contained in an essay by Michael Squires, 'D.H. Lawrence's Narrators, Sources of Knowledge, and the Prob-. lem of Coherence.' It studies analytically and fully, with examples from early, middle, and late periods, 'his use of various narrative voices,' and, distinguishing precisely defined degrees of 'bonding' between narrator and character, traces the development of 'the narrator's complex stance.' It is one of several thoughtful, instructive essays in this collection. Mark Spilka, in a reading of the early story 'The White Stocking,' brings a new subtlety to the study of the role of male violence in Lawrence's treatment of sexual relations. Paul Delany, discussing Lawrence's concern with the woman question and how it influenced his portrait of Ursula in The Rainbow , identifies three phases of female identity represented in the novel: complimentarily (division of labour in marriage), identification (equality in the masculine public sphere), and difference ('female feminism,' the affirmation of woman's particularity). This brings into sharper focus the personalsexual and social dilemmas faced by her, and enables Delany to raise an important question about Lawrence's attitudes: if Ursula's rejection of patriarchy is also a projection of the author's 'own grudge against the patriarchal order,' how far does this confuse the issue of female identity? Wayne Templeton, in what was for me the most suggestive essay, argues that chronic sickliness and the tuberculosis it led to radically altered Lawrence's sense of self. It necessitated a 'coping mechanism': the determination to transform death into life, 'to find in the body itself ... another source of life,' which he called 'blood-consciousness.' It was in this literal sense that he declared his belief in the resurrection of the body and spoke, in 'The Man Who Died,' of the 'immortality of being alive without fret.' Templeton argues that within a year or two of his marriage Lawrence was also 'coping' with near-impotence. With the recent disclosure of an affair with Rosalind Baynes in 1920, recorded by her in a posthumously published memoir and reported in the second volume of the Cambridge Biography, the evidence is against him. Isn't it more likely that, before TB finally made himimpotentin the mid-192oS, he was sexually inactive when he was seriously ill and active when he wasn't? 302 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 In the space left to me I can do little more than list the other essays in this collection that I would especially recommend. Holly Laird explores the ambivalences of the early poetry. James C. Cowan confronts an early psychoanalytic account of Sons and Lovers with a more recent one; a biographically and critically illuminating exercise. Ginette Katz-Roy documents Lawrence's apocalyptic response to the portents of mass civilization, setting it in the context of social psychological theories current in his lifetime. (MICHAEL KIRKHAM) Gregory Baum. Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics McGill-Queen's...