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.  

A Brief Note on the Question of Scale in the Work of D. H. Lawrence

Okay, one last time: these are small, 

but the ones out there are far away.

 

 

As a mortal being, man is a creature of time and space. That is to say, one bound by certain limits and defined by certain coordinates and measurements. Man, therefore, is not so much the measure of all things, as measured by all things and Lawrence insists on the importance of man knowing his limits; of accepting that he ends where his fingers and toes stop. 

 

Having said that, Lawrence also asserts that man has a transcendent quality and is like a rose; "perfected in the realm of the absolute, the other-world of bliss" [RDP 9]. When we blossom into singular being, we do so off the scale; "absolved from time and space" [RDP 9]. 

 

That’s why Lawrence hates talk of the average man or woman, perfectly cut to size, and rejects ideals of equality and social perfection. The average, he says, is a pure abstraction; "the reduction of the human being to a mathematical unit" [RDP 63]. 

 

However, Lawrence certainly believes in a scale of values and what Nietzsche termed an order of rank. Every man and every woman may be a star, but they exist in relation to one another and must fall into place according to their status: "The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so." [RDP 103] 

 

Thus, there’s a very real social scale operating within the Lawrentian universe, only he insists that it’s a natural hierarchy. There must, says Lawrence, be a system of some sort and there must be different classes; "either that, or amorphous nothingness" [RDP 111]. And the individual’s place within this system is determined by the degree of power - or life - that they manifest in the world: "The only thing to do is to realise what is higher, and what is lower, in the cycles of existence." [RDP 352] 

 

This has nothing to do with size or even physical strength, but everything to do with vitality or what Lawrence sometimes calls vividness. A tiny ant, for example, belongs to a higher cycle of existence than a giant redwood because it is more alive and, if it comes to a contest, "the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree" [RDP 357]. 

 

Similarly, this is why Hepburn is right to insist to Hannele – much to her irritation – that, ultimately, he is greater than even the tallest mountain [Fox 137-38].

 

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are from the following four essays: 'Love', 'Democracy', Education of the People', and 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine'.

 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

 

 

Notes 

 

The image is from an episode of Father Ted entitled 'Hell' [S02/E01], dir. Declan Lowney, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, in which Ted uses some toy cows to try to explain issues of scale and perspective to Dougal whilst on holiday in a caravan. The episode originally aired on 8 March 1996. Click here to watch the iconic scene on YouTube.  

 

This post was inspired by Catherine Brown's presentation - 'D. H. Lawrence and the Sense of Scale' - to the D. H. Lawrence Society (14-10-20).

When Jayne Went to Ireland

Jayne Mansfield (1967)

Photo by Jane Brown

Just a couple of months before achieving immortality on US Highway 90, the American movie star Jayne Mansfield paid a visit to the town of Tralee in South-West Ireland. It was a visit which, as we shall see, caused much consternation among the clergy who were determined to prevent Miss Mansfield from performing at the Mount Brandon Hotel, thereby safeguarding the moral welfare of the good people of County Kerry ...   

Jayne had been gamely touring the UK on the clubs and pubs circuit and although she wasn't pulling in the crowds as hoped, she nevertheless continued to receive a nightly fee of £3000 - which was an extraordinary sum of money back in 1967. When the Mount Brandon Hotel offered her the chance of earning an extra £1000 for a half-hour set consisting of just six songs, Mansfield and her management team immediately agreed to the gig. News of the one-off show by the notorious blonde bombshell spread like wildfire and the 10/- tickets went like hotcakes. For if Jayne had become something of a joke figure in her homeland, in Ireland she was still a very big deal indeed.  

Unfortunately, news of her impending visit also reached the ears of John Charles McQuaid; the profoundly conservative Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of All Ireland. He immediately determined that the show must not be allowed to go on and that Miss Mansfield should be made aware in no uncertain terms that she was not welcome in the Republic.

Looking back now - and through the eyes of a non-believer - it seems a ridiculous fuss over nothing. One can't help thinking of the classic early episode of Father Ted entitled 'The Passion of Saint Tibulus' (S1/E3). For in much the same way that Bishop Brennan charges Ted with protesting the screening of a supposedly blasphemous film at the Craggy Island cinema, Archbishop McQuaid instructed the 82-year-old Bishop of Kerry, Dennis Moynihan, to ensure that Miss Mansfield did not perform in Tralee.

Although feeling rather put on the spot, the aged priest nevertheless agreed to see what he could do and local churches immediately launched a public campaign calling on all God-fearing men and women of the region to boycott the show by a woman whom they described as a goddess of lust. Rumours, however, that priests marched up and down outside the venue with placards reading down with this sort of thing and careful now are, alas, untrue.       

Whilst most people were indifferent to the whole affair, the campaign against Miss Mansfield attracted huge media attention and made headlines around the world. Subsequently, by the time she flew into Shannon Airport there were large crowds of fans, protesters and journalists waiting for her to step off the plane. As she did so, she waved and blew kisses to the crowd and informed everyone to a loud mix of cheers and boos, that the show would go on.

Unfortunately, however, the show had been booked for a Sunday night (April 23rd) and this afforded the Church the opportunity to attack Miss Mansfield straight after mass that very morning. Priests across Kerry warned their congregations to stay away and ensure the town of Tralee wasn't twinned with Babylon in the minds of the watching world. In an official statement, the show was described as a Satanic attack on decency: "If you worship Christ in the morning, you can't dance with the Devil in the evening."

Sadly, although Jayne was undeterred, the owners of the Mount Brandon Hotel lost their nerve. They initially informed her that the show would have to be cancelled because the support band had got lost en route from Dublin (in fact, the Kerry Blues were a local act who all lived in Tralee). Eventually, however, the owners of the hotel admitted that their cowardly decision to cancel at the last minute was due to clerical pressure and adverse publicity.   

To her immense credit, Jayne simply smiled - as she always smiled - and when interviewed about what had happened refused to blame anyone, insisting that the people of Tralee were sweet and had been very kind to her. Six weeks later, she was dead and the Catholic Church had yet another act of vicious and shameful stupidity on its conscience to one day apologise for, having effectively cast stones at a beautiful woman contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

Notes

To watch a rare and fascinating news segment on Jayne Mansfield's controversial trip to Ireland in April 1967, click here. The footage includes an interview with the glamorous film star. Apologies for the loss of sound in some parts.  

Anyone interested in watching the episode of Father Ted that I refer to, can find it in full on Vimeo: click here. 

It's instructive - and amusing - to compare what happened to Jayne in Ireland with what happened to the Sex Pistols in Wales a decade later; the infamous Caerphilly gig (14 Dec 1976). Click here to view a half-hour documentary about this. 

For other posts on Miss Mansfield, click here and here.