Lawrence and Literary Theory

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 them in his plays, Watt is on surer ground with him than with Joyce. In recalling O'Casey's Dublin plays, one has no problem in also remembering their parody of Watt's melodramatic myths in the sets, dialogue, and what happens to the characters. In The Plough and the Stars, for example, the myth of young love, of success and happiness (Boucicault's "pastoral elements"), occupies the early scenes of the play, with the myth of the self-sacrificing hero dominating the middle scenes. Finally, the death of Clitheroe and the resulting madness of Nora undercuts both myths. Similarly, in "The Shadow of a Gunman," while the poet sings of love and the "hero" pretends to sacrifice and have courage, the women act as heroes and suffer the consequences. And in Juno and the Paycock, nationalism causes both the injury and death of Johnny Boyle, even as romance contributes to Mary's downfall, and nothing is reconciled at the end. The "state of chassis" allows O'Casey's strong women to survive, but his weak, posturing men are capable of neither romance nor heroism . In O'Casey's propaganda plays, especially The Star Turns Red, Watt finds even more indebtedness to Irish melodramas, but also sees the plays approaching the materialist theatre of Brecht and Bond. Perhaps. Watt is on safer ground in noting that his two melodramatic myths now prevail in novels, movies, and TV programs which have Irish characters. As with the earlier melodramas, one suspects that our current fare tends to cater to, instead of attempting to improve, the popular taste. On balance, Watt's work on the popular theatre and Joyce and O'Casey's use of it for inspiration is worth studying. While I do find some of his connections a bit forced, he offers a service by exploring an area which most of us know little about and therefore causes us to stretch our thinking more than a little. He also offers some thirteen excellent illustrations, a 40-page appendix which lists plays performed in Dublin between 1898 and 1904, good endnotes, a usable works cited section, and an accurate index. If only other works were so accurate and useful. Jack W. Weaver ___________________ Winthrop College Lawrence and Literary Theory Keith Brown, ed. Rethinking Lawrence. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990. χ + 198 pp. Cloth $75.00 Paper $25.00 THE PUBLICATION of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence over the last dozen years, along with the recent 402 BOOK REVIEWS appearance of new Lawrence biographies by Keith Sagar, Jeffrey Meyers , and John Worthen, brings into sharp focus a curious fact about Lawrence's current critical standing. While the ongoing CUP enterprise effectively institutionalizes and "binds" Lawrence (in several senses of the word) for posterity, critics have been remarkably slow to reconsider his writings in light of recent literary theory. Given the iconoclastic stance of many of his works as well as the maverick quality of Lawrence himself, there is more than a little irony involved here. In his introduction to Rethinking Lawrence, Keith Brown baldly asserts that "Most 'classics' of Lawrence criticism are products of a mental world which intelligent twenty-year-olds today simply do not recognize as their own, and which even the middle-aged are beginning to find somewhat remote ." This volume of fourteen essays aims to review Lawrence's writing and thought in the context of what Brown claims are "currently competing critical modes." In "Opening Up the Text," Paul Eggert helps one to understand some of the reasons for the putative inertia in Lawrence criticism. Eggert underscores the contradiction between the essentially conservative CUP-DHL enterprise and the predominant currents of theory that, in the last two decades, have in effect decentered the author and reconstituted the text as a locus of discursive play, ideological conflict, and radical indeterminacy. That Lawrence critics, at least until very recently , have rarely attempted to appropriate the newer theories as they might apply to his works is partly explained by the difficulty of discussing the works without reference to their author. As Eggert points out, even if we conceive of Lawrence as...