...and, having writ...
This is not to say, of course, that reading Lawrence (or any other author) requires a suitably refined theory of intention.
This post continues Tuesday’s reflections on Michael Fried, the problem of “literary impressionism,” and its capacity to bring into focus some distinctive problems of D. H. Lawrence’s relation to writing in both its material and spiritual aspects.
The foregoing sketch can no more than hint at the range of implication of Fried’s work, whose animating contrast between “absorption” and “theatricality” the Hegel scholar Robert Pippin has recently linked to a broader modern concern with “authenticity” and the threat of its loss in the life lived in the eyes of others. Such a “theatrical” abandonment of selfhood can be so total as to be imperceptible, making life under modern conditions seem, for many artists and thinkers, Lawrence included, a kind of “living death.” (In his recent Philosophy by Other Means, Pippin names Lawrence along with George Orwell and Nietzsche as among those writers in whose view “we have become the living dead.”)
Yet if such concerns mark the broadest scope of Fried’s project, I would like to begin by considering an aspect that is more incidental to it—less a claim than a guiding assumption—but which offers an important avenue of approach to Lawrence. Fried diverges from much contemporary work in art history as well as literary studies in his insistent intentionalism. As he writes in his new study, acknowledging at once an indebtedness to, and profound divergence from, the “scene of writing” as theorized by Derrida:
To be as plain as possible: throughout this book I understand myself to be trying to elucidate one or another structure of writerly intentions on the part of Crane, Conrad, Hudson, Ford, Kipling, and others, with the important proviso that I also imagine those writers to have been unaware of crucial aspects of those intentions, which therefore are to be understood as having come into play as if automatically, below the threshold of conscious awareness, or at least below the threshold above which they would be recognized as what they are.
That superb final proviso is significant for the study of Lawrence in two ways. It has long been recognized that reading Lawrence challenges the taboo on “intentionalism” long dominant within the field of literary studies.1 In this regard, Fried’s distinguishing of levels of intention that may or may not rise to the level of conscious awareness (distinctions that underpin his interest in repression) sketches a useful range of possibilities. This is not to say, of course, that reading Lawrence (or any other author) requires a suitably refined theory of intention; rather, what is needed is an openness to the range of relations between author and work that can fall under that name.
So, within the space of a few sentences, Lawrence’s 1929 essay on “Pornography and Obscenity” both deprecates concern with intention as “dull” and reaffirms the concept in a way that broadens its scope:
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