J. C. Green: D. H. Lawrence Portrait
(Pencil, pen, and acrylic on paper)
behance.net
behance.net
Whilst it's debatable to what degree Lawrence might be considered a sophisticated dialectician, he was, according to James Walker, a master of dialect and his use of pit talk delivered in a broad East Midlands accent "frightened the life out of middle class Edwardian critics" [1].
Walker suggests that Lawrence primarily used dialect and "multiple variations of speech patterns" in order to help readers understand a character's social background, education, and intelligence. And I don't disagree with that.
However, I also think Lawrence used dialect as an aggressive form of defensive communication, that is to say, verbally reactive behaviour adopted by individuals feeling anxious and self-conscious in a social context that differs from ones with which they are familiar and in which they feel more at ease.
Freud was one of the first to research defensive communication from the perspective of his psychodynamic theory. But you don't need to be a qualified therapist to recognise that no one likes to feel insecure, inferior, or judged. Unfortunately, defensiveness doesn't help matters and often serves to further impede interaction.
We see this, for example, when Oliver Mellors meets Connie's sister, Hilda, and doesn't quite know what to say or how best to behave and so gets defensive, slipping in and out of his expletive-laden vernacular in a manner that is almost a little insane and which comes across as affected and a form of play acting [2].
Ultimately, it could be argued that his passive aggressive technique of using dialect in order to confuse and intimidate, is as ill-mannered as someone from a highly privileged background - such as Clifford - casually slipping in and out of Latin or ancient Greek when talking to someone who didn't have the good fortune to study classics at Cambridge [3].
Notes
[1] James Walker, 'Tongue and Talk: Dialect poetry featuring D. H. Lawrence', a blog post on D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage (14 May 2018): click here. Although Walker doesn't tell us why it's a good thing to terrify people, he clearly approves and seems to personally resent the fact that these critics found Lawrence's use of dialect ugly and dismissed his plays set in the mining community from which he came as sordid representations of lower class life.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterey's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter XVI.
[3] Of course, there is a difference; the former being defensive behaviour by someone socially disadvantaged and the latter being offensive behaviour by someone in a socially superior position. Nevertheless, both types of behaviour involve an element of bullying and if the latter is snobbish, the former is, arguably, only an inverted snobbery. Being able to slip into a regional dialect or cant slang doesn't necessarily make you a better - more authentic - human being than someone who prefers to speak the Queen's English; the vernacular is not some sort of elementary language enabling a uniquely powerful expression of Dasein.
For a follow up post to this one on the use of dialect in D. H. Lawrence as an erotico-elementary language, click here.
All dialect is tribal, and the tribal dynamic 'appen goes (or did go!) much deeper than our marvellous modern education and modern civilised manners.
ReplyDeleteBy 'tribal dynamic' I assume you refer to consanguineal kinship - or what we with our 'modern civilised manners' might term incest.
ReplyDeleteLawrence liked to live on the periphery, and being an outsider certainly gave him a sense of power. All of those garden parties with the elite must have made him feel anxious and out of place. He certainly raged against the 'seething literary shits' . So yes, I can how dialect can act as a form of defense. Have you read about how people who've suffered from PTSD have completely changed their voice as a means of distancing themselves from trauma. Wonder if there's a link there?
ReplyDeleteOne day, we will have to interrogate this myth of Lawrence as 'outsider'. It's amusing how, as you note, he both romanticised himself as marginalised or on the periphery, yet attended 'garden parties with the elite' (what's that expression involving a cake?).
DeleteKnow nothing about PTSD, I'm afraid. Where I was coming from in the post was hinted at in one of the footnotes - concerned with Heidegger's notion of an elementary language (or elemental vocabulary); i.e., the idea that there are certain words that speak us more fundamentally than others ...
Mellors could match her in polite conversation if he wished, but has surely chosen to display some earthiness in order to have some fun at the expense of the hard-hearted hostile Hilda - after all she is seeking to undermine the relationship between himself and Connie. As Mellors points out, his dialect makes him no more affected than her. "An' up i' Tevershall yo'd sound affected", he tells her. He's intolerant of false manners. There's too much at stake. He's entitled to be emotional. He sorts her out. But she takes some swipes at him too. And Connie likes him for his fearlesness.
ReplyDeleteThe dialect is a more elementary and elemental language, and versatile too. It's the language of intimacy and sexual tenderness.
Maybe it isn't dialect which is the erotico-elementary language that you dream of, but birdsong and I refer you to an earlier post: https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2013/09/zarathustra-and-nightingale.html
ReplyDeleteFor periphery and outsider see Amit Chaduhuri's D.H. Lawrence and Difference
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reference, though I'm fairly familiar with the critical material on Lawrence and his work, including this text. I think I also have a good understanding of how notions of externality, marginalisation, and otherness function within theoretical discourse - and, indeed, within the language of the media and advertising.
ReplyDeleteFor example, it's interesting to note how John Worthen's 2005 study of DHL was originally going to be subtitled 'The Life of a Writer', but the people at Penguin decided that 'The Life of an Outsider' sounded so much sexier and marketable.
And so, whilst it may be that Lawrence was often at odds with the literary establishment and wider society, we need to be careful when using such terms as outsider that we don't simply perpetuate a romantic mythology of the artist as rebel.
Fair point, but given his nomadic lifestyle, living across continents, never living anywhere for more than two years, he was a constantly encountering new communities and places and so technically, to some extent, an outsider. He certainly wasn't static and fixed to one place. But I guess he did return to the same places and he certainly made sure he was the centre of wherever he lived. Complex, as always.
ReplyDelete