D.H. Lawrence and “Difference”: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present By Amit Chaudhuri, Oxford, Rs 495

Perhaps the principal thing to say about Amit Chaudhuri’s D.H. Law- rence and Difference is that it is a book that needed to be written — and not just for a better understanding of Lawrence’s poetry, which it does provide.

Take Chaudhuri’s analysis of Lawrence first. It is widely recognized that Lawrence criticism tends to veer between ecstatic adulation and unrestrained denigration, and that Lawrence — as a poet or as a novelist — has not been well served by his Western critics. John Middleton Murry set the trend in his polemical essay on Women in Love, which he described as “five hundred pages of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end”, a judgment against which Leavis “saw no reason for protesting”. Virginia Woolf labelled his language “cryptic”, while even the sympathetic R.P. Draper found it “esoteric”. A recurrent charge is that Lawrence produced formless effusions exhibiting “the crudest kind of sexuality” (Murry), in place of carefully crafted artistic wholes, a damning judgment in an aesthetic tradition that values form. Not that Lawrence had no supporters, but they tended to focus on the opposite term of the form/fantasia binary. The earlier supporting voices saw Lawrence as the instinctively “pure artist”, with this pure essence standing as a worthy alternative to skill. The more nuanced readings of recent critics like Anne Fernihough (D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology) acknowledge his pluralist thinking, but ultimately stay within the organicist paradigm.

Chaudhuri’s central argument, on the contrary, is that to understand Lawrence, one needs to abjure Western notions of artistry and form — “Lawrence’s poetic discourse constitutes a language that cannot be fitted into mainstream structures of interpretation and value”. Applying Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the bricoleur (originally used by Gerard Genette), Chaudhuri describes Lawrence’s poetry, not as a well-wrought urn, but as bricolage made up of repetitions, intertextual fragments and the poetic equivalent of “found objects”. This poetry takes its resonance from the contiguity of image and idea rather than from an internal complexity of design. Law- rence’s “design”, in fact, is to reveal, rather than conceal, the process of the poem’s making, resulting in a perpetual feeling of “unfinishedness”.

As the noted Irish poet and critic, Tom Paulin, observes in his foreword to the book, Chaudhuri’s Lawrence “constructs poems in the manner of Picasso’s sculpture, The She Goat, which is made from a wicker basket, palm leaves, scraps of iron, ceramic pots”. This “risk-taking” constructivist aesthetic is buttressed by Lawrence’s rejection of the seamless artefact marked by consistent internal logic — “Give me nothing fixed, set, static.” His favourite metaphors for textuality were ooze, mud, clay, sludge, junk, pebbles and scrap — materials that can be freely moulded into unique shapes. Hence Chaudhuri concludes, “The mode of reading practised by the New Critics, is not the most productive way of reading Lawrence’s poetry.”

Lawrence’s basic “difference” as a poet within the mainstream British tradition lies, therefore, in the way in which his compositions are “put together” rather than in their architectonic consistency. Chaudhuri conflates this “difference” with the Derridean “différance” and its perpetual deferral of presence. Lawrence’s bat, for instance, is not a clearly identified object out there to be delineated poetically, but constituted from a mélange of hints and suggestions — is it a bird? a black glove? a spool of black thread? a smudge of soot? — that leaves the mind grappling with the impossibility of defining reality.

Chaudhuri’s next and bolder move, taking off from the trope of poetic “difference”, is to conscript Lawrence as the eternally suspect Other of the British or European Self (so much so that he is like a “foreigner” within the mainstream tradition) and to relate critical reservations about Lawrence’s work to sociological (difference of class) as well as aesthetic concerns. “What stands outside culture,” Gabriel Josipovici has written in The Lessons of Modernism, and Other Essays, “can only be barbarism.” For Chaudhuri, Lawrence’s poetry is “barbaric” in this sense: instead of being what we recognize as culture, it is often the opposite of culture, or more truly, “something quite different or no opposite at all”.

This is the point of the “postcoloniality” in the subtitle. Chaudhuri draws on Foucault to show how Lawrence, from his position on the periphery of the British social cosmos, tilted at the power centres of monologic mainstream discourse by dialogically formulating an “alternate aesthetic”. This aesthetic rejected the “proper” artistic task of selecting, organizing, mediating and thereby conferring meaning upon experience, in favour of rendering experience directly, in all its fluidity, banality, and epistemological slipperiness.

This “other” or alternative discourse is situated by Chaudhuri in two ways. First, he locates Lawrence within the tradition of John Ruskin, who preferred the imperfect to the monumental, and who celebrated the subaltern culture of the Etruscans and the Goths in place of the hegemonic Roman and European cultures.

Chaudhuri then extends this argument to the sphere of the postcolonial. He dubs Lawrence a metaphorical postcolonial, by reading postcoloniality psychologically and aesthetically rather than historically and politically. Lawrence appropriated, deferred and “wrote back” to the mainstream just as later postcolonial writers did, twisting and bending that tradition practically out of shape in order to project his own, very different, worldview. Chaudhuri claims that he was able to read Lawrence from the perspective of “difference” precisely because he is himself — as a postcolonial reader — outside that tradition. “It enabled me to record not only how I had been changed by English literature, but how English literature had been changed by my relationship to it.”

That last observation indicates why this book needed to be written. It is possible to balk at some of Chaudhuri’s strenuous pleading for Lawrence’s untidier effects. The purist will shudder at the cavalier manner in which he dips into Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Josipovici, Genette and even “rasa” theory to support his argument. Nevertheless, his reading of Lawrence from his position as a postcolonial subject deserves to be commended. Indian critics respond far too often to the masterpieces of the Occident without any trace of their culture, background and artistic assumptions individualizing their voices. Chaudhuri’s book, apart from being a radical, if controversial, re-reading of Law- rence’s poetry, goes a long way towards bridging that gap.