Tuesday, September 29, 2009

DH Lawrence

Good ol' DH Lawrence. Nothing like a little Oedipal repression to get a story started, huh?
Lawrence's story, rather curiously, reads like a Hemingway story, at least on stylistic terms. Lawrence quite overwhelmingly uses short sentences, and when his sentences get longer, they are often composed of short clauses and commas galore: "It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it." There is clearly a lyrical element in Lawrence's prose that is absent in most other writers (except Hemingway), which isn't surprising considering Lawrence was also a fantastic poet. The repetition of the S sounds (springs, still-swaying) and H sounds (rocking-horse, horse, head, heard) here create a tension between the different sounds, and so gives the sentence a swaying rhythm, much like the rocking-horse itself.
The dialogue also has a similar feeling as that of Hemingway, by which I mean that we could imagine people actually speaking in this way, "'It's like this, you see, sir,' Basset said, 'Master Paul would get me talking about racing events, spinning yarns, you know, sir...'
Perhaps in this manner, Mr Orwell would be pleased. Words are chosen carefully, and rarely if ever is the meaning of the writing in question. Indeed, Lawrence's diction is anything but pretentious, and dead metaphors aren't found.
Lawrence is quite unlike Hemingway in another area, however, which is narrative perspective. Hemingway's narratives are generally third-person limited. We get very little in the way of a psychological profile of the characters, and the meaning is left to be inferred by the reader. Lawrence, on the other hand, is third-person (semi)omniscient, where we get relevant background information and and we also get certain character's thoughts. In fact, the story is psychological to the degree that action itself is largely neglected (which isn't a bad thing). Nothing of much substance actually happens as a palpable event (aside from the winning of the money), rather, the story progresses through dialogue, for example the conversation between Uncle Oscar and Paul in the car, and also through psychological events, namely the riding of the rocking-horse. The riding of the horse itself isn't significant aside from the fact that Paul is actually riding the horse, rather, what is significant is what Paul wants or thinks will come of his act of riding on the horse. But elliptically, much in the mode of Hemingway, the reader must infer much of the meaning. Hemingway and Lawrence, then, share much in the way of style (sentence structure, rhythm, dialogue) and overall effect (the reader infers the ultimate meaning), but where they differ markedly is in how the story is given to us.

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