Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 The new Cambridge Edition of the Works is helping to clarify the genuine complexity of Lawrence's development. Students will have to look elsewhere to find insight into the historical and ideological climate in which Lawrence worked; other critics will help them to appreciate the variety of modes in which he wrote ("The Crown," the two books on the unconscious, the travel books, Apoca^ypse-arguably any of these could serve as well as the Hardy essay as the taproot to a Laurentian essence). Nevertheless Daleski's study is one that should continue to be appealing, not least to those newly armed with literary theory (somehow these have managed more or less to overlook Lawrence so far). Deconstructionists, for instance, ought to relish the notorious list of polarities, and there are already signs that feminists are preparing to take on the gender identifications in their various transmutations throughout Lawrence's works. Suffice it to say that the next generation of readers could do worse than turn to Daleski as a guide to Lawrence's world, or at least a prime sector of it. Ronald G. Walker __________________________________Western Illinois University____________ LAWRENCE: MYTH AND METAPHYSIC P. T. Whelan. D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in 'The Rainbow' and 'Women in Love.' Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1988. $44.95 D. H. Lawrence's most important contribution to the modern novel (and there are many) lies in the concept of character which he fiercely defended in a letter of June 1914 to Edward Garnett: You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropie states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and carbon are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say, "diamond, what! This is carbon." And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) Serious readers of the long narratives which we have agreed to call novels are cognizant of the character who is a function of the growth of another character rather than present in his own right-Harriet Smith in Emma, Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers, for example. But when a character grows round, gaining the reader's 117 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 affection and involvement in the process and then is flattened in his relationship to another, there is a sense of having been misled-or, to paraphrase Lawrence, a feeling that the novelist has his thumb on the scale. This round-to-flat regression is the fate of Lydia Lensky in The Rainbow. Ursula Brangwen evokes similar reader response in that novel as she moves from a state of passionate sexual arousal to one of Bacchic frenzy in Chapter 11, for the shift of her emotions is quite unexplained by any action on the part of her partner, Skrebensky. But just as "allotropy" designates a structure in which more than one crystal formation of the same element inheres, Lawrence's allotropie characters contain more than one personal matrix. Yet no matrix is at war with the other; rather, these "crystal formations" of character appear and disappear as events of greater than personal significance play upon the screen of the narrative. This change from carbon to diamond and back to carbon, sometimes within a single three- sentence paragraph, sends even the well-seasoned Lawrentian into an occasional Bacchic frenzy of book throwing. (Wouldn't it have been more appropriate for Hermoine to bash Rupert Birkin with a weighty volume than with blameless lapis lazuli?) However, P. T. Whelan's D. H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in 'The Rainbow' and 'Women in Love', presents carefully argued evidence for the origin of Lawrence's theory of character in his absorption and integration of myth. Mythic studies of Lawrence are plentiful, but they have been largely those of one-on-one correspondences between...