Topic started by Vishvesh Obla (@ nas-70-195.albany.navipath.net) on Sat Nov 18 22:11:38 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

D.H.Lawrence is perhaps one of the most misunderstood writers of the literary world. A novelist he basically was, he was very un-conventional from the literary stream. This un-conventionality is seen in most of the great writers who had something original to say that their works become diverse complex forms of expression. But Lawrence is baffling, for he seems to have had some of the primordial modes of human perception that the human race has forgotten. He is, hence, either as a Savage, and is, condemnatory or a kind of seer or even visionary. Both of these estimates are very common with him which stand in our way to a proper understanding of him.

It cannot be denied that all through his works we find something at a level more than the normal level of human understanding and perception. Lawrence, for the first time in Literary History, starts talking about the issue of ‘human consciousness’ through the era of European history starting from the times of the great Greek Classicists. The consciousness in man has a comprehensive mode of experience that involves the fullest involvement of all the faculties that he is born with and which develops as he grows. The primary centers of consciousness shift at the different periods of one’s life but basically they all lead to a fulfillment of each other leading to an awareness which is not just mental but of the entire being itself. His novels are all portrayals of the stunted growth of such human consciousness found in our modern times. They find their culmination in his magnum opus, “Fantasia of the Unconscious”, where he discusses the various plexus and ganglions which are the seats of human consciousness, how they interact with each other leading to a fuller consciousness, how we jeopardize the natural harmony of them by our excessive emphasis on a few modes. Lawrence observes an altered pattern of the growth of human consciousness from the age of our reasoning, from the age of the great Greek philosophers, when man started becoming a sort of mental being. The Mind becomes the center of consciousness and all our conscience is MENTAL. We translate everything we come across into mental IDEAS that kill the kind of vital relation we could maintain earlier in our older civilizations. Even Sex, a great pre-mental force that is a vital source of life, is ‘mentalized’ so that it has lost its life and has become a matter of perversion in our modern times. (His “Lady Chatterley’s Lovers” is one of the sanest books written on men-women relations). Lawrence sees the Etruscans, the Chaldeans, the Aryans and many of the older civilizations having a kind of pre-mental knowledge of life which could offer them a better kind of life which was vitally related to all the things they were in touch with.

Now all this kind of stuff may sound abstract, but it is a question of attitudes one needs to take if one wants to read Lawrence. It is not a question of you believing him or not. It is a very serious question involving the very sanity of mankind and the basic convictions that something is seriously false with our lives. Lawrence will forever remain an enigma as long as we continue to produce more and more mental human beings that we all basically are. He gives us an opportunity to see through that veil that has kept us blind and to read him patiently and understand him rightly is only a question of one’s choice to remain sane or not...

Responses:

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• From: Vishvesh Obla (@ alb-66-24-214-34.nycap.rr.com) on: Mon Mar 4 10:05:11
  
  I will try one last time to fix the italics. It is really amazing that everything seems to be fine but the display would become so cranky ! Admin, if possible please remove the above repetitions.
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  I read a wonderful work on D.H.Lawrence by F.R.Leavis titled D.H.Lawrence : Novelist . It is a sequel to his magnum opus The great tradition in which he(Leavis) traces out the traits that make a living tradition and a continuity of it among a few great English novelists, behind their technical originality that distinguishes them for their individual contributions. D.H.Lawrence has produced so much of bewildering criticism today that a reader gets lost as to what he essentially was. He was also the kind of writer susceptible to any kind of criticism and could be easily portrayed as a sexist, a mystic, a psycho-analyst, an ignoramus and even a neo-nazist. Even a critic as great as T.S.Eliot could be entirely wrong in his judgement of Lawrence and preferring the mentally sterile works of Joyce over his.
  
  This book first tries to look at the forces that were against the recognition of Lawrence as the major creative source of the twentieth century (greater than that of Eliot himself). Leavis finds that it were the conditions created and nurtured by a few life negating interests unfortunately promoted by a creative writer as Eliot himself, which stood right in the way to a closer understanding of Lawrence. Art in its wholeness, is much beyond an attitude of distaste and disgust towards life which exemplified the works of Flaubert, and against whom Lawrence can be placed diagonally opposite. And Flaubert isn’t much different to the attitude of life T.S.Eliot displayed. It is a failure of intelligence as Henry James puts it aptly, on the character of Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary and it is precisely the presence of intelligence, an intelligence born of the whole integrated psyche that characterizes the works of Lawrence. For, his intelligence is the representative in consciousness of the complex need of the whole being, and is not thwarted or disabled by inner contradictions in him. Lawrence was very much against any life negating interests, for he had a magnificient perception of life in its fullness and lived from its sources than from the mind. Leavis goes on to prove how a smaller work of Lawrence’s like St Mawr could be a greater creative force than Eliot’s Waste Land. His criticism on the major works of Lawrence --The Rainbow and Women in Love-- dispels all the hitherto extraneous understanding of Lawrence.
  
  
  One note of caution: just as the worst difficulty we have in coming to terms with his (Lawrence’s) art is that there is resistance in us to what it has to communicate – if only the kind of resistance represented by habit, as Leavis remarks, it is equally difficult to get into terms with criticism of this kind and that too when it has to go against such a major force as T.S.Eliot.
  
  
  
• From: test (@ alb-66-24-214-34.nycap.rr.com) on: Wed Mar 6 09:50:14
  
  test for removing italics
  
  
• From: SR (@ mail.waldorf.edu) on: Fri Mar 8 01:21:27
  
  Greek classicists... hahaha.
  
  
• From: SR (@ mail.waldorf.edu) on: Fri Mar 8 01:27:06
  
  Great Greek philosophers... hahaha.
  
  
• From: Ila Morgan (@ 203.199.232.27) on: Fri Mar 8 03:55:38
  
  V. Obla
  
  well i m also one another of hardcore D.H. Lawrence fans, but i prefer his poems to his novels........he is a person devoid of any superfiiciality unlike present day writers........
  
  
• From: abhilesh (@ ) on: Mon Jun 7 08:47:55
  
  hi sir very very interesting novels
  
  
• From: Akila.S (@ ppp-219.65.122.112.chn.vsnl.net.in) on: Tue Jun 8 02:42:47 EDT 2004
  
  D.H.Lawrence was not recognized during his lifetime,maybe that set the fire going on and on for the perfect phrases appropriate word sfor narration an unique quality of him.I can just rewind "Sons and Lovers " in my mind and play it all over again after quite a few years of having read the novel. The protogonist giving milk with lot of water to his sick mother so that she neednt suffer more by living with the little nourishment the the milk wd provide.Lawrence's short stories are tightly packed with emotions.he is not for a light reading. Once yiu read one of his novels you sure are to go for the rest
  
  
  

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