His characters reveal themselves in love-hate fluctuations.

Loving each other passionately they can experience detestation, hatred, aversion. Lawrence questions the stability and unity of the self. The I in his writings is more than one, diverse. So, his characters are elusive, wandering, unfathomable, obscurely outlined, vague, merely suggestions.

Style. Recognizing Lawrence's genius, critics qualify his style as obscure, repetitious, periphrastic, wordy, loose, with unrestrained emotionalism. He wrote too much and wrote too quickly. He allowed himself liberties.

We encounter different styles in his writings: naturalistic, imagistic, impressionistic, expressionistic, which merge, complicated by his peculiar rhythmicality, mythologism and symbolism.

Lawrence's language. He extended the boundaries of the English language. His language is always in the service of his ideas. He refused to subordinate the ungovernable order of nature and human moods to the control of language. His is a synaesthetically sensorial, impressionistic, expressionistic, antithetical language of natural things, of flowers, moons, trees, animals, sensual impressions. His wording reflects Lawrence's perceiving the world visually, audibly, tactually. He manages to create a veil of vague haziness which is on the canvases of Impressionists. He developed a vocabulary to define the nature of the unconscious forces within the psyche , to represent his religion and philosophy.

He wanders throughout different semantic fields of sensorial perception, of vagueness, transience, changeability, operating with word-building paradigms of the constituents of these fields {grey-greyly-greyness- to grey , greying, the grey, a grey}, amply using all the constituents of these fields in their primary and secondary nomination (shadowy flowers, shadowy sensations). There is much light and colour, conveyed by the corresponding semantic fields.

His key word is dark with its derivatives. By darkness he means blood knowledge, instinct, intuitive life, animal nature. The meaning of this word profoundly depends upon its environment. It can mean mad, raging, fathomless, shameful, unnatural, alien, subconscious, hidden, invisible, inward…

His impressionism and expressionism are synaesthetic. We encounter the tangle of sight, sound, smell and touch associations in his writings. He combines and juxtaposes words from different sensorial fields to create synaesthetic and metaphoric effects, personified images, elusive and changeable ( The dark flame of life might warm the cold white fire of her own blood /The Ladybird/).

The language betrays the insistent presence of the author who is imposing his religious and philosophic ideas on his characters as well as the reader .We have seen already that his sensual religion differs from spiritual Christian religion. Religious words holy, holiness, immortal, immortality, sacred, god, etc. express in his writings love, ecstasy, communion, desire.

His words lose their cognitive meanings in illogic combinations. They succeed each other, according to the poetic logic of metaphoric association and contextual synonymy rather than the logic of syntax. He departs from strictly rational logic, illogically and irrationally combining words which is in accord with his perception of life as spontaneity. He places incompatible words into the nearest proximity, receiving contextual synonyms and antonyms: ...his manhood was cruelly, coldly defaced (The Rainbow). And always, she was burning and brilliant and hard as salt, and deadly (The Rainbow). The predominance of the dichotomic method expresses itself in an abundance of words, used antonymically (paradigmatic and syntagmatic antonyms).

Imagery (Personification, simile, metaphor, synaesthesia, symbol). The world round his characters is full of life. It vibrates and pulsates. Even the inanimate objects can be violent with life or soulless. In Lawrence's artistic cosmology all atoms of the universe are animalized and personified. Markers of personification are gender-sensitive pronouns, antropomorphic words of different classes normally associated with human beings. The moon in Women in Love watches the heroine with a white and deathly smile. Roses in Sons and Lovers kindle something in the hearts of the young lovers.

Lawrence richly resorts to colourful impressionistic epithets while describing the colour contrasts of nature and the mystical effects they produce on his characters. Similes are abundant in all his writings. Some of them are expressions of his symbolization (To her , Jesus was beautifully remote, shining in the distance, like a white moon at sunset /The Rainbow/). A woman's rebirth is likened to the growth and blossoming of a flower.

His metaphors mix the occult with physics. His characters seem to dwell in a field of force interacting with each other through "will”, "influence", presences", "spells", "impulses", "trances", "power", "electricity", "magnetism".

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 734