Abstract
Language is not identified explicitly as one of Lawrence’s themes in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, even though metaphor is so evidently the starting point for saying anything. The focus in this chapter is chiefly on the relation in his work between metaphor and ‘metaphysic’, a word that acquires a Lawrentian specificity. It does so as Lawrence repudiates, in the course of his career, Lascelles Abercrombie’s view that fiction must be in possession of a controlling ‘metaphysic’. Lawrence took an alternative view: ‘[I]f I don’t “subdue my art to a metaphysic”, as somebody very beautifully said of Hardy, I do write because I want folk — English folk — to alter, and have more sense’ (Letters, I, p. 544).1
We profess no scientific exactitude, particularly in terminology. We merely wish intelligibly to open a way.
(Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, F&P, pp. 234–5)
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Notes
Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study ( London: Martin Secker, 1912 ).
See, for instance, David Ellis, ‘Lawrence and the Biological Psyche’, in D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, ed. Mara Kalnins (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1986), pp. 89–109;
James Cowan, D.H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth (London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), pp. 15–24. Evelyn Hinz, comparing the style and structure of the two books argues for the ‘scientific’ mode of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in contrast to the ’archetypal’ mode of Fantasia of the Unconscious;
Evelyn Hinz, ‘The Beginning and the End: D.H. Lawrence’s Psychoanalysis and Fantasia’, The Dalhousie Review, 52 (1972), 251–65.
Edward Nehls, ed., D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957–9), I, p. 215.
For a representation of the ideas, principally on sexuality and community, which Frieda communicated to Lawrence at the beginning of their relationship, see Turner, Rumpf-Worthen and Jenkins, The D.H. Lawrence Review, special issue, ‘The Otto Gross-Frieda Weekley Correspondence’, 22, no. 2 (1990).
Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, 2nd edn (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1957 ).
Murray M. Schwartz, ‘D.H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis: An Introduction’, The D.H. Lawrence Review, 10, no. 3 (Fall 1977 ), 215.
For a critique of ‘Lawrence and the British Object-Relations School’, see Anne Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, pp. 77–82. For book-length studies of Lawrence’s relationship to various psychoanalytic schools, see David Cavitch, D.H. Lawrence and the New World ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1969 );
Daniel J. Schneider, D.H. Lawrence: The Artist as Psychologist ( Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1984 );
Daniel A. Weiss, Oedipus in Nottingham: D.H. Lawrence ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962 ).
Cited in Jeffrey Mehlman, ‘Trimethylamin: Notes on Freud’s Specimen Dream’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 177–88, p. 179.
Malcolm Bowie, ‘A Message from Kakania: Freud, Music, Criticism’, in Modernism and the European Unconscious ed. Peter Collier and Judy Davies (Cambridge: Polity Press; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990 ), p. 15.
Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, Fontana Modern Masters, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Fontana, 1991 ), p. 84.
See Rose Marie Burwell, ‘A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading’, in A D.H. Lawrence Handbook, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982 ), pp. 59–125.
See also Rose Marie Burwell, ‘A Catalogue of D.H. Lawrence’s Reading from Early Childhood’, The D.H. Lawrence Review, 3, no. 3 (Fall 1970), special issue, ’D.H. Lawrence’s Reading’, 193–330.
Alfred Booth Kuttner, ‘A Freudian Appreciation’, Psychoanalytic Review, 1916, repr. in D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, ed. Gamini Salgado, Casebook Series, general editor, A. E. Dyson ( London: Macmillan, 1988 ), pp. 69–94.
Judith G. Ruderman’s account of the mother figure in Lawrence is interesting, written at a time when critical interpretations of Lawrence were being rigorously revised, particularly by women; Judith G. Ruderman, ’The Fox and the “Devouring Mother”’, The D.H. Lawrence Review, 10, no. 3 (Fall 1977 ), 251–69.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos ( London: Martin Secker, 1933 ), p. 49.
Catherine Stearns aligns Lawrence with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray in an attempt to ‘write the body’; Catherine Stearns, ’Gender, Voice and Myth: The Relation of Language to the Female in D.H. Lawrence’s Poetry’, The D.H. Lawrence Review, 17, no. 3 (Fall, 1984 ), 233–42, p. 238.
Frederick Hoffman sees Lawrence as a mediating figure between the practitioners of Dada and the Surrealists, and ‘The New Apocalypse’ poets of the 1940s. They shared with Lawrence ’his opposition to external or impersonal ordering of their minds’ and approved his shift ’from a clinical to a mythological point of view’; Frederick J. Hoffman, ’From Surrealism to “The Apocalypse”: A Development in 20th Century Irrationalism’, Journal of English Literary History, 15 (1948), 147–65.
See Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction. A Commentary (London: Macmillan, 1986 ). The extensive index-entry for ‘hand, hands’ indicates its importance within Lawrence’s thought about the body, incorporating the association with ’touch’ and, therefore, a non-analytical mode of ’knowledge’.
In D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Michael Bell notes the ’“independent” intelligence’ of the hand in this passage (p. 90). Patricia Hagen, ‘The Metaphoric Foundations of Lawrence’s “Dark Knowledge”’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 29 (Spring 1987–Winter 1987), 365–76), discussing the same example, talks about the ’guiding intelligence’ which is ’inherent in the organism’ as opposed to the machine (p. 369). She underlines Lawrence’s refusal to consider this ’intelligence’ as distinct from the body or any other part of human functioning.
T.H. Adamowski, ‘Self/Body/Other: Orality and Ontology in Lawrence’, The D.H. Lawrence Review, 13, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 193–208, argues that Lawrence ’begins with a body that finds itself conscious’ (p. 197).
Barbara Hardy, also citing the writing hand passage, calls it one of Lawrence’s ‘apparently casual but intense pieces of critical self-consciousness’, see, Barbara Hardy, ’D.H. Lawrence’s Self-Consciousness’, in D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 27–46; p. 37.
Michael Ragussis notes that ‘verbal consciousness’ is a phrase used by both Lawrence and Freud, arguing that ’The dialectic between patient and analyst becomes replaced in Lawrence by another kind of dialectic… “art-speech”; Michael Ragussis, The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition ( Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 ), pp. 4–5.
Helen Haste, The Sexual Metaphor ( Hernel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993 ), p. 37.
I particularly like the pun on ‘jouissance’ noted in the introduction to Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 16, as ‘j’ouïs sens’, ‘I heard meaning’. This also recalls the Heideggerean formulation that when we ‘dwell’ in language we hear the ‘speaking’ of language.
Daniel Albright, Personality & Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf and Mann ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978 ), p. 24.
See Paul Ricoeur on oxymoron in ‘The Work of Resemblance’, Study 6 of The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (1975, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 173–215; pp. 194–5. Ricoeur’s distinctions are referred to at greater length in Chapter 7 of the present study.
Keith Alldritt, The Visual Imagination of D.H. Lawrence (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), p. 130. Further references to this study follow quotations in the text.
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© 1997 Fiona Becket
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Becket, F. (1997). Language and the Unconscious: The Radical Metaphoricity of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious I. In: D. H. Lawrence The Thinker as Poet. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378995_4
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