Metaphor and Meaning in D.H. Lawrence's Later Novels

Book excerpt: Although D. H. Lawrence's later novels have been the subject of much discussion by critics, few scholars have recognized or dealt with his sense of craft. By examining Lawrence's careful and finely orchestrated strategies with language, especially metaphor, Humma argues that a number of the longer works--from Aaron's Rod on and including the posthumously published The Virgin and the Gipsy--are small masterpieces. Different in kind from Women in Love or The Rainbow, these fictions are very important in their own way. Humma maintains that the early and middle novels work largely through powerful symbols. Those of the last decade, though, develop through an intricate interlacing of metaphor and symbolic detail. Humma devotes a chapter to each to Aaron's Rod, The Ladybird, Kangaroo, St.Mawr, The Plumed Serpent, The Virgin and the Gipsy, Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Escaped Cock. Aaron's Rod, as a transitional work, reveals much about Lawrence's narrative method and its dependence upon combinations of images. The Plumed Serpent, Humma suggests, is Lawrence's most ambitious failure. Other critics have faulted plot, character, and meaning, but Humma sees incoherent metaphors as the basis for those other problems. Because Lawrence's metaphors shape myths essential to central actions and meanings, the reader cannot fully appreciate the strategic function of metaphor in them. When Lawrence's method is successful, as it is in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, figures of speech overlap each other, crossing boundaries in a web of "interpenetrating metaphors" that provide both structural integrity and thematic resonance. Paying close attention to the texts, Metaphor and Meaning in D. H. Lawrence's Later Novels shows that Lawrence was far from the indifferent craftsman in his later fiction that he has frequently been considered. In fact, Lawrence was acutely aware that language and meaning are inseparable, that technique, as Mark Schorer said, is discovery. John Humma's fresh perspective upon the art and meaning of Lawrence's later work provides a major revaluation of this last phase in the writer's career.