The Dialogue In The Fiction Of David Herbert Lawrence

Abstract:

The paper describes the artistic world of D. H. Lawrence form the point of theory of intermediality, that is the implementation of the visual, musical and cinematographic imagery in the work of verbal art as well as the dialogue between the tradition and novelty

Key words:

dialogue, intermediality, modernism, imagery

Any transitional epoch is characterized by the dissatisfaction of writers and poets with the range of means of artistic expression that literature possesses to reflect the crucial phenomena of life. “That is why in the critical periods of cultural history: in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and at the turn of the century: XVIII – XIX (romanticism), XIX and XX (modernism), XX and XXI (postmodernism), the dialogue” [1] in the form of interaction of verbal and other types of art (painting, music) increased. The writer’s equal command of the verbal and other arts constitutes a special problem in the context of art synthesis. The literary text is inevitably a reflection of the syncretic consciousness of the author and is saturated with the imagery of different types of art. Thus, the writer’s work must be considered comprehensively from the point of view of the interaction of closely and organically intertwoven and mutually enriching artistic worlds, i.e. intermediality, which is a phenomenon based on the organization of a literary text on the basis of combining a pictorial vision or musical perception with the language means of implementing a creative idea. The intermedia analysis allows us to consider the literary work from the point of view of the presence in the artistic work of such figurative structures that include information about other forms of art.

This phenomenon is clearly manifested in the work of David Herbert Lawrence.

David Herbert Lawrence (D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930) – “one of the most distinctive English writers of the beginning of the last century. Twenty years of his creative biography are an example of intense artistic search. They resulted in ten novels, ten books of poems, as well as a few plays, more than fifty short stories, several novellas, travelogues, a lot of literary and critical essays and personal notes that made up the writer’s diary and published after his death” [1]. Lawrence owes his worldwide fame to four novels ‘Sons and lovers’ (1913),’The Rainbow ‘(1915),’Women in Love ‘(1920), ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘ (1928).

The philosophical and aesthetic program of Lawrence and the syncretism of his creative consciousness were shaped under the influence of such dissimilar trends as neorealism (J. Moore), analytical philosophy (B. Russell), ‘philosophy of life’ (V. Diltey, A. Bergson, O. Spengler), and especially the philosophical conceptions of F. Nietzsche, Z. Freud, A. Bergson, C.-G. Jung, A. Schopenhauer.

“Following Nietzsche, Lawrence is convinced that there is only a subjective interpretation of the world around us, and the world created by the artist becomes a living reality, more independent than the author who created it. In the novels of Lawrence, Nietzsche’s ideas about the ‘will to power’ and the superman are interpreted. Lawrence is convinced that the desire for power is the lot of the chosen, who are called to create an ideal human society. However, unlike Nietzsche, for Lawrence, the natural is more significant in the characterization of the superman.

Like Freud, while recognizing the subconscious as the natural basis of personality, Lawrence did not analyze it as mechanically and meticulously as Proust and Joyce. In this respect, he is much closer to the theory of the ‘collective unconsciousness’ by C. G. Jung.

Lawrence is in tune with Jung when he depicts the struggle of his characters for independence and internal sovereignty; it is no coincidence that such characters are usually associated with the so called ‘mechanical world’ thus designating unacceptable for him aspects of modern society. To convey the relationship between them, Lawrence resorts to mythological, religious, and fairy-tale-romantic symbolism as a means of embodying the intermediality of his consciousness.

The harmony of the ideas of Lawrence and Schopenhauer can be seen in the early prose of the writer, when it seems to him that only in the process of creation is achieved knowledge of the primary principles and driving forces of the world, the self-realization of the will of the individual.

In the spirit of Schopenhauer’s tragic worldview, Lawrence focused his attention on the grave conflict between creative freedom and the real life that was hostile to it. In fact, all of his work is a search for a solution to this conflict, which he came close to overcoming only in his last novel, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

In Lawrence’s prose and painting, one can feel Bergson’s ideas that instinct or intuition is manifested in verbal imagery and the boldness of compositional decisions, and that intelligence is an auxiliary force to intuition, unable to explore a living thing in its entirety – in the photographic accuracy of the image.

The writer relies entirely on the sense representation in which the true core of existance appears. He considers its reproduction to be the main task of the artist: this is the only way to capture the ‘kaleidoscope’ of constantly changing impressions, acting in the spirit of the literary impressionism of Ford M. Ford” [1].

Characteristic of the turn of the century, the tendency to interaction the visual possibilities of different arts finds in Lawrence expression in the creative use of the achievements of painting. Seeing the main task of art in the transmission of the emotional life of a person in its constant movement and change, Lawrence turns to painting and analyzes it from the point of view of the means of transmitting human relationships at a certain point in life and finds himself faced with the problem of using the means of spatial art in a literary narrative. As a result, the movement of the emotional life of the characters is created by fixing fleeting impressions reproduced by the novelist.

The synthesis of the above-mentioned philosophical and aesthetic propositions helped Lawrence find adequate literary forms for transmitting the new century’s worldview. He creates books whose poetry has enriched European literature and culture, shows that even against the background of visible concreteness of material reality, it is extremely difficult to reveal the usually unnoticed complexity of feelings and characters, the discrepancy between actions and intentions.

Lawrence’s oeuvre entered the history of literary as a bold attempt to understand the complexity of consciousness and feeling, which is not accessible to ordinary perception. However, it seems that the writer himself was not completely sure that this attempt was successful. That is why, going beyond literature, he turned to other types of art, which allows us to talk about the intermediality in his work.

Among Lawrence’s literary predecessors and contemporaries, “George Eliot (1819-1880) and Thomas hardy (1840-1928) should be mentioned first. Lawrence is similar to them in the construction of the plot, chronological composition, and features of creating characters.

Following Hardy, Lawrence makes the personality in the conditions of disturbed harmony of its relationship with the environment the central theme of his early work. However, while Hardy is searching for the sources of conflict in social contradictions as a result of which the characters are faced with the choice either to accept this strange, often hostile world or to defend your personal ‘ego’ counter to public order, Lawrence sees its reason in the identities of the heroes, constantly struggling for the harmony between the demands of the instinct and the reasoning mind.

Lawrence’s works have similarities with J. Conrad (1857-1924) and R. Kipling (Kipling, 1865 – 1936), and following them embodies the complex and contradictory inner world of man ‘at the crucial point of the personal tragedy’ of alienation. Unlike Kipling’s characters, Lawrence’s characters are often passive, and their attempts to change their lives are sometimes inept; unable to break with the familiar, but spiritually and emotionally alien environment, aware of their alienation, they resign themselves to the status quo and focus on finding harmony with themselves rather than with the world around.

Despite the clearly realistic origins of his work and the claim that the dignity of the novel consists in ‘fidelity to living reality’, the moral crisis and, as a result, the artistic crisis prompt Lawrence to seek ways to update the novel and enrich its visual possibilities. As a result, Lawrence, not unlike V. Wolfe and J. Joyce, an innovator in the field of form, introduced to literature a new concept of the hero, whose ‘I’ should be fluid, changeable, but revealing in this external instability proximity to the deep, ‘root’ structures of natural existence.

Compactness and integrity, images, plot elements, motives, symbols that pass from one work to another, the belief in the eternal value of human individuality and personal freedom unite the work of Lawrence and Edward Morgan Forster (Forster, 1879-1970). Both writers are alien to blurring the meaning, the deliberate complexity of the text, and the fascination with all sorts of techniques aimed at detecting artistic conventions that are characteristic of modernist writers. The similarity is also found in the arguments of writers about the time sequence that underlies any novel and organizes it into a single whole, as well as about the intermediality of literary works.

The influence of the prose of Henry James and the poetry of Walt Whitman on the work of Lawrence in terms of the use of the means of intermediality cannot be overlooked. It is to the pictorial possibilities of the word that they turn in search of how to reach the border where moral and artistic ideas converge and express the complexity of the psychological motives of human behavior.

Lawrence experienced a strong fascination with Russian literature, especially the works of M. Gorky. In the characters of Lawrence and Gorky, distributed in accordance with the Nietzschean hierarchy of ‘beast-man-Superman’, there is a noticeable presence of Nietzschean aestheticism, which implies admiring the force as an aesthetic ‘extra-moral’ phenomenon and combining realistic features of the image of reality with a deep symbolic meaning.

In the crisis period (1915), associated with the beginning of the World War I and the subsequent severe personal experiences that forced him to leave England, as well as with the ban on the novel ‘The Rainbow’, Lawrence turns to the works by F. M. Dostoevsky. In the concept of ‘nature’, regarded as one of the criteria of human and professional maturity, Lawrence saw a common desire for their creativity to convey the disharmony of the world that man lives and generates. However, while for Dostoevsky the social context plays a significant role in revealing the image of the character, for Lawrence the main task of the novelist is to convey the emotional life of the person in their constant movement and change in order to understand the relationship between the person and the world around him, regarded outside its connections with social reality.

Lawrence argued with Dostoevsky, criticizing the Russian writer for the excessive presence in his works of ‘the author’s consciousness, be it prophetic or painful’, because of which his novels are perceived like biographical documentaries. However, the change in the narrative style of the late Lawrence and his gradual deviation from the monologue characteristic of his early novels in the expression of the author’s position in favor of the dialogic indicate the influence of the Russian writer.

The romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) attracted Lawrence with his fantastic images, symbols and allegories. Blake’s experiments in color and poetry encouraged the writer’s search. Lawrence supported the anti-intellectualist motives of Blake’s philosophy: from his point of view, the human mind is devoid of independence, rudely subordinated to the prevailing morality and poisoned by the ascetic preaching of the official religion; the only true refuge of spiritual freedom is the human body and its five senses. The basis of the harmonious existence of the individual is the liberation of the instinctive principle.

The pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris were interesting to Lawrence due to their photographic accuracy, i.e. their’ absolute fidelity to the image’, as J. Ruskin put it.

Inspired by innovative trends in painting and photography, Lawrence tries to achieve the effect of accurately recording a specific moment of reality by means of literature and convey the perception of life as a set of moments in time. This is shown in his descriptions, aimed at depicting the simplest phenomena of everyday life, to demonstrate their diversity and subordination to the laws of existence that have not yet been solved.

Thus, due to the artist’s characteristic features of his vision of the world around him, the attraction to image accuracy inherent in photography, Lawrence combined spatiality as the basis of painting with the temporal characteristic of a literary work. As a result, using the means of intermediality, he created a space-time artistic image, which later became the fundamental of the cinema” [1].

Thus, Lawrence embodied the characteristic of the philosophical and scientific thought of his era, the idea of life as ‘an existence that manifests itself in a continuous change of sensations, emotions, desires, in short, in the experienced change of states of our psyche.’

Lawrence introduces the imagery of visual and musical arts in a verbal text; to create verbal pictures through poetic language (metaphors, epithets, artistic comparisons, colours); at the level of poetic symbols and allegories (flora and fauna); at the thematic level: the heroes of almost all his early works are artists or artistically gifted people, having the appropriate vision of the world.

The interlude allowed Lawrence to expand the pictorial possibilities of the English novel and enrich it with features that went beyond the literary tradition: in the first works of the writer there is an impressionistic imagery that shows the transience of human existence and its inseparability from the existence of the surrounding world in the incessant flow of time; his late works depicting human life as a change of contradictory emotional states are marked with an unexpected connection off photographic precision of the pre-Raphaelites and the coloristic expression characteristic of van Gogh; the need to disclose, to motivate movement of the soul and instincts that arise in the later works, finds adequate means of artistic expression, and disappointed by the possibilities of words, Lawrence is entirely devoted to painting.

The evolution of Lawrence as a writer went simultaneously with that of Lawrence as an artist and art connoisseur. In his reflections on artists and their art, Lawrence insists that the critic must reveal the psychology of the masters of painting. Least of all can the psychology of the artist become detached, contemplative: this position does not allow us to perceive the surrounding reality in its scale and completeness. Such tendencies lead to the fact that visible images are transmitted already mediated, processed in the mind.

The analysis of Lawrence’s early novels ‘The White Peacock’, ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’, ‘Women in Love’ in the context of intermediality allows us to note a number of features:

• keeping in touch with the genre, composition, and stylistic traditions of the English realistic novel;
• updating the theme: replacing the event series that determines the interpersonal conflict of a realistic novel with a description of internal psychological conflicts and emotional experiences that determine the intrapersonal conflict, as well as the desire to find the artistic means necessary to convey the conflict in the individual’s mind;
• using (following the pre-Raphaelites) the achievements of painting, the play of light, shadow, color and form (characteristic of impressionist and post-impressionist artists) in works of verbal art;
• use of symbols based primarily on images of flora and fauna.

When considering the novel ‘Women in Love’, which completes the work of Lawrence in the 1910s, it reveals changes that indicate the entry of the writer into a period of creative maturity:

• changing the tone and atmosphere of the work: from the complex and life-affirming optimism of the novels of the 1910s, Lawrence proceeds to reproduce the atmosphere of tragic moods, anxiety, loss, helplessness associated with the loss of former values and uncertainty in finding new ones;
• changing the image of the inner life: to the narrative of the character’s feelings, experiences, and reflections characteristic of early novels, a complex, myth-based symbolism is added that connects the inner life with the laws of the Universe.

Dialogue between the imagery of different types of art in a literary text as well as the dialogue with the literature of the previous epochs, so clearly manifested in the work of Lawrence, remains an inevitable means of implementing the creative idea in the literature of the new Millennium.

References

1. Антонова К. Н. Художественный мир прозы Д. Г. Лоренса 1910-х годов: интермедиальный аспект: дис…. канд. филол. наук. СПб., 2011. 174 с / Antonova K. N. Hudozhestvennyj mir prozy D. G. Lorensa 1910-h godov: intermedial’nyj aspekt: dis…. kand. filol. nauk. SPb., 2011. 174 s