Women in Love - D H Lawrence - 1920

While there is much to recommend the reading and re-reading of D H Lawrence’s Women in Love - from the precise and moving descriptions of the natural world and man-made environments to the psychological impulses that control the behaviour of people - the style and content of the novel elicits strong emotion, oftentimes positive but occasionally negative. On the one hand, readers love his descriptions of flowers and trees, the banks of a lake, the muddiness of a miner’s boots and the seductive way that he reports the colour and fit of a character’s clothes or the shape and feel of household objects. Many admirers applaud how strikingly well Lawrence is able to track the physiological and emotional modulations undergone by individuals as they contemplate sexual desire. Two days after Lawrence’s death in France, The Manchester Guardian published an obituary, laudatory in content and imitative of Lawrencian form which stated that his writing “made him a rebel against all accepted values of modern Western civilisation, one who challenged the disintegration not only of those who were actually caught in the blind mechanism of industry but of all who reflected a stultifying materialism either in a hard possessiveness, a soft emotionalism, or a sterile intellectualism.” The eulogy is all but explicitly referencing the main characters - Ursula, Gertrude, Rupert and Gerald.

On the other hand, many readers, some contemporaneous with Lawrence and others discovering his work in this new millenium have found aspects of his style and some of the underlying ideas that have shaped the content of the novel to be problematic and sometimes frustrating. T S Eliot writes that Lawrence is “the one contemporary figure about whom my mind will, I fear, always waver between dislike, exasperation, boredom and admiration.” A case can certainly be made for the notion that Lawrence’s content and style promote a kind of “bullying” or “declamatory didacticism”. Sometimes, he goes too far: when his style mimics what can be described as essentialist rhetoric (unmistakable in  “blood-knowledge”, “male vitality” and paradoxical couplings like “separateness in union”), readers are left wondering if, in his quest to create a new interpersonal paradigm and a new literature to express this new world, he doesn't begin to sound like a proto-fascist. 

It is true that D H Lawrence’s sexual politics are complex and not altogether palatable or justifiable, particularly to us, his modern readers, but it is also true that his prose is original, memorable and moving so perhaps the final word ought to go to him: 

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

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Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust - 1932 (English Edition)

Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a unique literary-philosophical text, exceeding the standards of the usual novel of both its time and ours in its breadth, depth and complexity. Committed students of these four thousand pages need to hold a multiplicity of elements in mind while reading the volumes. Some of the philosophical, psychological and literary ideas, as varied as Bergsonian reformulations of time and memory, the validation of the Freudian subconscious, and the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative strategy are all woven into the stories of several dozen eccentric characters. Modern readers are treated to long, unbroken reflections on the various categories of memory or aberrant love or the fanciful qualities of the imagination, for instance, all the while trying to follow plot lines and character development. If one adds the sometimes suffocating depth of detail presented by the narrators (sometimes omniscient, sometimes first person, sometimes he is a young man, sometimes old), the task of assimilating all that is written can appear impossible. 

But the effort expended yields considerable satisfaction if the reader persists to the last volume, Time Regained, where the novelistic responsibilities of the text are completed (the fate of all the characters is revealed, closure is established) and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel are distilled into a few pages of explanation. The narrator, after revisiting the the people and places that have shaped his life, after sharing with us some new secrets and introducing one or two new characters to the saga tells us of his epiphany:

Then a new light arose in me, less brilliant indeed than the one that had made me perceive that a work of art is the only means of regaining lost time. And I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life...stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival…

The message is hugely optimistic: the passage of time is not necessarily negative. In fact it can lead to a work of art: the narrator believes that if he can recall events, impressions and details of his life and then reshape them via his imagination, he will be able to transform a life lived and eventually finished, into a work of art that may resonate past his own death.

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