On the Use of Dialect as an Erotico-Elementary Language in D. H. Lawrence

An aged priest of love sharing terms 

from his phallic vocabulary 

Image by Realitees on teepublic.com

 

 

I. 

 

It has been suggested that the use of dialect in Lady Chatterley's Lover - liberally interspersed with expletives - is an attempt by D. H. Lawrence to construct an erotico-elementary language that is expressive of what he terms phallic tenderness. An attempt, in other words, to translate feeling and desire more directly - more authentically - into words; to speak straight from the heart rather than the head. 

 

Readers of the novel can decide for themselves how successful he is in this; whether, for example, it's a real advance in the poetics of courtship and amorous discourse for Mellors to tell Connie that she's "'the best bit o' cunt on earth'" and how pleasing it is to him that she shits an' pisses [1]. 

 

But I would like to make the following points, if I may ... 

 

 

II.

 

Firstly, I quite admire the refusal by Mellors to speak standard English - the language of his class enemies - at all times and in all circumstances, even though he is perfectly capable of so-doing. If his lapsing into the vernacular and use of profanity is partly a defensive mechanism, so too is it oppositional and defiant. Perhaps he even has a duty to try and articulate his thoughts and feelings in his own words as far as is possible - as do all those who pride themselves on their singularity.   

 

Having said that, I'm not sure how far we can (or should) take this. I don't, for example, like the idea of individuals or small groups of people - tribes - retreating into semi-private languages in order to uphold some narrow identity and exclude others. I'm not arguing for a universal language which would somehow absorb all others and allow only a single vision to be expressed in but one tongue, but I do like the idea of being able to communicate.        

 

Secondly, I'm dubious when Lawrence suggests that a mixture of East Midlands dialect and a sprinkling of obscenities allows Mellors to articulate desire and display a proper reverence for sex and the body's strange experiences. He can't, of course, provide any evidence for this; it's ultimately just a personal preference for the language of his childhood based upon an intuitive understanding of physical consciousness. 

 

I'm inclined to agree with Richard Rorty's dismissal of this type of fantasy as, at best, lacking in irony, or, at worst, politically reactionary:

 

"What is described as such a consciousness is simply a disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors. Unless we suffer from what Derrida calls 'Heideggerian nostalgia,' we shall not think of our 'intuitions' as more than platitudes, more than the habitual use of a certain repertoire of terms, more than old tools which as yet have no replacements." [2]      

 

The problem is, Lawrence does - on occasion - suffer from something pretty similar to this form of philosophical sickness. He trusts his intuitions and, more, he believes his phallic vocabulary does a huge amount of work; i.e., that words such as tenderness, touch, desire, and fuck can be employed to bring about a revolutionary change in society; that such terms have almost a magical power and that they are closer to some vital primal reality and constitute what he terms blood-knowledge (a kind of instinctive common sense).  

 

Heidegger designated such terms as elementary - although, obviously, he privileged very different ones from Lawrence - and in Being and Time he claims that the "ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expresses itself" [3]. 

 

Now, as I confessed in an earlier post [click here], there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was an occult litany of words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike; a kind of Adamic language, if you like.  

 

But now I fear this is precisely the kind of linguistic mysticism that Heidegger paradoxically practised whilst also warning against - not least of all because it's open to ridicule. 

 

Indeed, whenever Mellors shouts out arse! cunt! balls! like an erotomaniac with Tourette's, he reminds one of Father Jack Hackett, the foul-mouthed, lecherous old priest played by Frank Kelly in the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted. His attempted display of authenticity is, ultimately, full of transcendental pretension and, as such, is laughable; Connie's sister, Hilda, is right to find him (and his use of dialect) affected. 

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: Lady Chatterley's Lover is an attempt by Lawrence to bring together the personal and the political, by showing us how sexual self-discovery and social revolution could be united in one project articulated via a phallic narrative spoken by Oliver Mellors.

 

Like Heidegger, Lawrence "thought he knew some words which had, or should have had, resonance for everybody" [4]; words which were relevant not just to the fate of people who happened to share his concerns and obsessions, but to the public fate of the modern world. He was unable to believe that the words which meant so much to him - words rooted in the body - don't necessarily excite the same interest or call forth the same response in others (not even from amongst his most sympathetic readers).

 

As Rorty concludes: "There is no such list of elementary words, no universal litany. The elementariness of elementary words [...] is a private and idiosyncratic matter" and the democracy of touch is simply a beautiful attempt by a poet and novelist to "fend off thoughts of mortality with thoughts of affiliation and incarnation" [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 177 and 223. 

[2] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 21-22. 

[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Blackwell, 2001), p. 262. 

[4] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 118. 

[5] Ibid., p. 119. 

 

 

This is a follow up to an earlier post on the use of dialect in D. H. Lawrence as a form of defensive communication: click here.  

On the Use of Dialect as Defensive Communication in D. H. Lawrence

J. C. Green: D. H. Lawrence Portrait

(Pencil, pen, and acrylic on paper)
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.