SOURCE: Findlay, Isobel M. “‘Word-Perfect But Deed-Demented’: Canon Formation, Deconstruction, and the Challenge of D. H. Lawrence.” Mosaic 28, no. 3 (September 1995): 57-81.

[In the following essay, Findlay considers Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature in light of deconstructionist critical methodology, emphasizing his belief in multiple textual meanings.]

In recent decades changing faculty and student bodies and new methodologies have raised questions about the nature and distribution of power and authority, challenging traditional institutional, disciplinary and discursive protocols. Not surprisingly, the consequent reconstitution of English as a discipline—a veritable paradigm shift registered in the 1992 MLA publication Redrawing the Boundaries (Greenblatt and Gunn, eds.)—has occasioned very different responses: read apocalyptically by formalists and literary historians, this reconstitution has been seen as the dangerous politicizing of literary studies and the academy, or even as the end of Western civilization; read approvingly by feminists, poststructuralists and Marxists, it is seen as a belated gesture of inclusion and liberation. What therefore becomes dramatically clear is the way that such rhetoric and polarization attest to the continuing political importance of the canon, its role in the construction of social subjects and of terms we live by—nation, class, gender, ethnicity.

Quite a different picture of canonical change, it would seem, is sketched by T. S. Eliot in “The Function of Criticism.” As he describes it, canonical reputations are made and remade in a process that is as natural as it is impersonal:

From time to time, every hundred years or so, it is desirable that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order. This task is not one of revolution but of readjustment. What we observe is partly the same scene, but in a different and more distant perspective; there are new and strange objects in the foreground, to be drawn accurately in proportion to the more familiar ones which now approach the horizon, where all but the most eminent become invisible to the naked eye. The exhaustive critic, armed with a powerful glass, will be able to sweep the distance … he will be able to gauge nicely the position and proportion of the objects surrounding us, in the whole of the vast panorama.

(“Function” 17)

Eliot presents canon formation and reformation as the humble submission to chronological necessity and impersonal desire: it is not so much a matter of revolution as “readjustment”—with all the consolations of natural continuity (“partly the same scene”) and precise measurement. Specular innocence, the disinterested perception of “the naked eye,” seems guaranteed by the viewer's isolation in the natural, not cultural landscape, and his objectivity and keen perception are ultimately confirmed by the use of a scientific glass. Like Matthew Arnold, Eliot resists the translation of ideas into revolutionary practice. Yet Eliot's claims are no less political and magisterial for all his studied modesty and casualness; what we have here is a version of the “specular economy” that Luce Irigaray denounces for its “pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal” (75, 78). Far from being beyond dispute, Eliot's claims to value and universality are partial in both their predispositions and their incomplete representation of interests.

In thus reading Eliot against the grain, I am practicing, in the context of high modernism, the sort of deconstructive reading that I wish to extend in this essay to the wider processes of remaking reputations, where my particular examples are both D. H. Lawrence and deconstruction. What I attempt here is to read Lawrence's critical discourse with a care and attention normally thought inappropriate or unfruitful, and to put into question the view of deconstruction as endless tinkering with texts and undoing of interpretations. In turn, by bringing Lawrence and deconstruction together, I aim to shed light on each by changing the context of their reading. To be sure, contexts are themselves, as David Morse reminds us, “ways of reading, understanding, assessing and evaluating. They are matters of definition” (88). In the context of this essay, I will probe deconstruction's potential to illuminate why Lawrence's criticism (including his interdisciplinary interests and accomplishments) has been devalued or used narrowly to clarify his life and fiction, but also consider why deconstruction has usually confined itself to parts of the traditional literary and philosophical canons. Why, I wish to speculate, have Eliot's critical writings enjoyed a secure and prominent place within the canon as an authoritative basis for defining modernism, while Lawrence's “deconstructionist” challenges to the dominant critical paradigm—to secure notions of the text's ontology, intentionality, disciplinary and generic definition, and to narrowly formalist theory and practice—have been either resisted or domesticated. In addressing this old yet persistent example of the distribution of privilege, I will concentrate first on Eliot and F. R. Leavis, arch-antagonist and fierce advocate of Lawrence respectively, and consider the implications of their influential, symptomatic constructions of Lawrence. Turning then to Lawrence's critical practice, I will explore his affinities with deconstruction, and suggest in a final section what academic deconstruction can learn from Lawrence's critical practice.

Although Eliot could concede in a lecture at the University of Washington, 9 July 1953, that Lawrence wrote “probably the most brilliant of critical essays” on Fenimore Cooper (American Literature 14), Eliot's earlier negative pronouncements on Lawrence have proved more enduring. In After Strange Gods (1934) Eliot argues that the “seductive simplicity” of any important heresy is doubly dangerous when the audience is ill-educated and when the writer is, like Lawrence, snobbish, subversive, intuitive and incapable of self-criticism, humor or “what we ordinarily call thinking” (58). All this is exacerbated by what Eliot calls Lawrence's “sexual morbidity” (39). Although Eliot allows that what Lawrence had to say about “the living death of modern material civilisation … is unanswerable,” he attributes Lawrence's power to some “Inner Light.” In this way, Eliot is able to restrict Lawrence's insights to a subjective domain, even though those insights are as closely connected as Eliot's own to collective traditions and public institutions. Employing a strategy of domination dear to patriarchs and reactionaries alike, Eliot concludes: “The man's vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick” (59-60).

According to Sandra Gilbert, “the only experience stranger than reading After Strange Gods is rereading it.” What is disturbing to Gilbert is not only Eliot's comment on “free-thinking Jews”—probably the Freudians or Marxists that threaten Eliot's comfortable orthodoxy—but also “the tone in which modernist poetry's elder statesman made them. Ostensibly benevolent and cautionary, it [the tone] barely concealed a sneer of social snobbery” (73-74). The book's origin as a series of university lectures given at the University of Virginia combines with its opening flourish of linguistic ability to establish the credentials of one who condemns Lawrence for his uneducated self-importance—this after a revealing attempt to distinguish these lectures from “exercises in literary criticism.” In what may seem to foreshadow blindness and insight—features that constitute literary language for Paul de Man—Eliot admits that, if his own work is marred by error, he is “probably the last person to be able to detect it.” Yet, such blindness is immediately trivialized: “but its presence or discovery would not condemn what I say here, any more than its absence would confirm it” (Strange Gods 11-12).

What is interesting here is the length to which Eliot goes to resist the qualities in Lawrence that challenge his own orthodoxy and the way that the terms of his disagreement with Lawrence ironically endorse Lawrence's transgressive strategies. Eliot's appeal to his audience is a remarkable mixture of hauteur and humility: he explains that he has “ascended the platform of these lectures only in the role of moralist” (Strange Gods 12; emphasis mine). This mixture, Terry Eagleton argues, is authorized by Eliot's “Membership of the Tradition” and by his “membership of the Christian Church” (Literary Theory 40). Moreover, as someone who will denounce heresy's “seductive simplicity,” its “direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions,” Eliot now presumes in his audience “common assumptions” and gestures of good will: “and perhaps the assumptions that are only felt are more important than those that can be formulated” (Strange Gods 25, 13).

Yet so profound are the differences within society, as Eliot apprehends it, that he resorts once again to a rhetorical blend of power and weakness, authority and acquiescence: “In a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person with strong convictions is to state a point of view and leave it at that” (13). Of course, Eliot does not leave it at that, but has used the first-person plural of an idealized bodypolitic (our society), even as he appears to retreat from the activism of Arnold's “one thing needful” in Culture and Anarchy to the realism of “the only thing possible.” This notion of community reappears later, when he takes time to point out that in the place where these lectures are being delivered—a place far from New York and “less industrialized or less invaded by foreign races”—tradition can be more securely grounded in “‘the native culture’” (16). Scare quotes notwithstanding, ideology reconstitutes itself here as fictions of nature, nurture and the origin, as an Agrarian fantasy only too vulnerable from a deconstructive point of view.

It is the glorification of novelty or originality “for their own sake” (23) that so offends Eliot. He is explicit about the “temporary and political” advantage of the labels “romanticism” and “classicism,” but shows no similar sensitivity to the grounding of his notions of right and wrong or to the ideology inscribed therein. Curiously too, Eliot's differentiation of tradition and orthodoxy rests on a distinction between the unconscious and conscious which makes him sound like the Lawrence he so firmly resists: “Tradition may be conceived as a by-product of right living, not to be aimed at directly. It is of the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain: it is the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present” (30). Similarly, he argues that he uses tradition and orthodoxy in ways “distinct from terms in theology” (31), although in a 1931 review he criticizes Lawrence for using the same strategy in his writing (“Victim” 361).

In a foreword to Father William Tiverton's 1951 study of Lawrence, Eliot was still characterizing Lawrence as “a man to read about, rather than an author to read” on the grounds that Lawrence seemed willfully to encourage misunderstanding and was “unaware of how much he did not know” (Tiverton vii-viii). Thus, Eliot in his “ambitious feat of cultural imperialism” developed what Eagleton calls “a whole political reading of English history” (Literary Theory 38), which entailed putting Lawrence firmly in his place. In doing so, of course, Eliot did not act alone: especially significant were the roles of the BBC (which, according to Armin Arnold [177], prohibited the mention of Lawrence's name), and the old boy network of reviewers, journal editors, small presses, as well as other forms of censorship. Eliot's stance was legitimated by his comfortably subsidized Criterion; by his association with Bloomsbury and publication by the Hogarth Press; by his assistant editorship of The Egoist; and by the network of associations with Middleton Murry, editor of Athenaeum, J. C. Squire and others who controlled reviewing in major journals and newspapers (Gross 235-39). The First World War further served to consolidate hegemonic forces around Eliot and tradition, while Lawrence with his German wife and his assault on traditional English styles and values seemed especially threatening. Such factors help account for Lawrence's experience of publication in “ephemeral pamphlets and periodicals” or in limited editions by small private presses (Roberts ix).¹

In contrast to Eliot, as early as 1932, F. R. Leavis was hailing Lawrence as “the finest literary critic of his times” (“D. H. Lawrence” 276). In D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955) he specifically attempted to defend Lawrence's congregationalist intellectual life against Eliot's snobbery and to affirm Lawrence's place in the English tradition (18). Indeed “the revived and reeducated feeling for health, that Lawrence brings are what, as our civilization goes, we desperately need” (16). Leavis complains that “Eliot did all that his immense prestige and authority could do to make the current stupidities about Lawrence look respectable” (23). Yet, despite all Leavis's counter claims on behalf of Lawrence, a problem remains—the problem of vagueness, noted even by a Leavisite such as R. P. Bilan (5).

This vagueness may be seen in Leavis's “Genius as Critic,” in which he discerns in Lawrence's criticism an “un-Eliotic freedom of utterance, [which] may sound a little naive. But plainly, what we in fact have is the vital and sure intelligence of the actual phoenix, the rare being who is alive in every fibre and has the centrality and easy swiftness of genius” (115). Leavis thus displays dogmatism and defensiveness in roughly equal measure in a discourse whose double nature is as unpersuasive as the actuality of the mythic phoenix.

Leavis's shifting allegiances to Eliot (traced by Bernard Bergonzi), the stridency of his attacks on the authority of others (as in his “Lawrence Scholarship”), and his passionate defense of Lawrence owe much to his own provincial Protestant background and his marginal status in the academic life of Cambridge. These factors shaped Leavis's sense of himself as the voice of sanity in the wilderness of modern civilization, as someone rejected by an academy that valued scholarship over criticism and also by men of letters who remained suspicious of that academy. Perhaps another factor contributing to his sense of isolation was his feeling of difference from artist-critics like Lawrence and Eliot, as Christopher Ricks has speculated.

A telling symptom of Leavis's conviction of his own marginality is his ambivalence about the status of the literary and of the literary critic. In his boundary disputes with philosophers and scientists, Leavis insists on the centrality of literature yet at the same time betrays fears about the “merely literary”: “Literary Criticism, then, is concerned with more than literature,” not the “merely literary” but with “problems of social equity and order and of cultural health” (Determinations 2). Literary criticism is thus a discipline both central and marginal to the academy, its focus both intrinsic and extrinsic to the texts it discusses. Eagleton presents a Leavis caught between an “inchoate amateurism” and “a socially marginal professionalism,” the critic endowed with analytical skills and experience unavailable to the “common reader.” If criticism “is rooted in a common social world, it is also ineluctably set apart from it,” Eagleton continues; “The tension between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, that is to say, merges with a parallel tension within Leavis's thought between sociality and individualism” (Function 69, 72). Scrutiny, the critical journal Leavis helped found in order to counter cultural decline, faced a similar dilemma; according to Eagleton, “At once national public sphere and partisan minority, spiritual centre and prophetic periphery, Scrutiny … marked an impasse beyond which liberal humanism is still unable to move” (Function 79). Pamela McCallum similarly stresses the contradictions between empiricism and idealism that lie at the heart of the English philosophical tradition within which Eliot, Leavis and I. A. Richards operated.

Leavis justifies his failure either to state or to defend his critical “assumptions” by insisting that literary criticism and philosophy are “quite distinct and different kinds of discipline,” and by appealing to the power of reading the text “in its concrete fulness.” Just as he defines “the ideal critic” as “the ideal reader,” so Leavis discriminates between philosophy that is “abstract” and poetry that is “concrete.” Carefully separating abstract reflection on the nature of literary value from the practice of criticism, Leavis holds to the specter of “queering one discipline with the habits of another” (“Literary Criticism” 212-13). Leavis's focus purports to be intrinsic here, as also in “The Wild, Untutored Phoenix,” where Lawrence is “a great literary critic” because he is “one who sees exactly what it is in front of him” (233-34). In Leavis's hopes for society and culture so much depends upon criticism-as-reading that one critic has mocked: “the Decline of the West was felt to be averted by close reading” (qtd. in Eagleton, Literary Theory 34). Yet the “touchstone of value” for Leavis's great critical campaign “had to remain exempt from critical scrutiny,” argues Chris Baldick: he stood for nothing less than “the principle of Life itself” (628). For Leavis, evaluation precedes abstract reflection, while literary values are the human values so necessary for the renovation of a diseased society. It is the continuity of the English tradition that must be retrieved and safeguarded by the educated minority for the sake of the nation as a whole. Despite a good deal of passionate self-scrutiny, Leavis fails to admit to his own interests, historicity and ideology, or to consider how his values are constituted by a commonsense belief in natural facts, a shared and stable sense of normative value and humanity.

Leavis's Lawrence, consequently, is a figure forced to conform to a Cambridge maverick's brand of conservatism, some of his transgressive force subdued in the process. Nevertheless, in his time and place, as Baldick suggests, Leavis had an irresistible appeal in that he “transformed the idea of English literature from a treasury of fine writing into a form of guerilla resistance against the cultural symptoms of capitalist development” (628). He offered an apparently “revolutionary” role in the teaching of English, but one that remained quite firmly outside the Marxist camp (Mulhern 73-77), and within the domain of “pre-industrial simplicity, organic harmony and unified cultural traditions” (Holderness 3).

Eliot's version of tradition had no place for the instincts, irrationality or vitalism which recommended Lawrence so powerfully to Leavis. Yet neither negative nor positive assessment did anything other than “feminize” Lawrence—in the one case as lacking the qualities of a literary master, in the other as too reliant on capacities already strongly marked by culture and tradition as feminine. Thus both served as grounds for Lawrence's exclusion from the canon of literary critics. Leavis's attempts to value the feminine in Lawrence met with critical opposition, that “recurrent strategy,” described by de Man, “of any anxiety to defuse what it considers threatening by magnification or minimization, by attributing to it claims to power of which it is bound to fall short” (Resistance 5). Effectively feminized by these various forms of resistance, Lawrence's critical texts have most often been isolated as aberrant or peripheral to a tradition magisterially defined by Eliot; Lawrence's concerns are seen as “other” than the “real” concerns of the dominant culture, and of modernism in particular. Such critical resistance—an example of what Roland Barthes calls a retreat from the writerly text, from polysemy, into the readerly one (4-6)—is legitimated by the apparently radical counter-narrative in Leavisite discourse. That Leavisite criticism continues to have this “radical” appeal begins to explain why poststructuralism has had so little impact on Lawrence scholarship. Evidencing this combination of English cultural bias and protectionism in his recent study of Lawrence, Michael Bell rejects theory as “fashionable,” its critical consequences “largely empty or trivial,” and he sees French theory in particular as leading to “essentially alien, and misleading, preoccupations” (230, 2).

Such has been the power of Eliot's and Leavis's mediation of the texts of Lawrence that subsequent critics have often failed to reread Lawrence for themselves. Eliot's attack on Lawrence significantly shaped Leavis's response and choice of exemplary texts. In the process of contesting Eliot's judgments, Leavis both encouraged the rereading of Lawrence and confined its results. Proponents of an internally contradictory modernist esthetic have had to go to great lengths to keep Lawrence in his place: he is as frequently accused of being misogynist or fascist as he is of being feminist or communist. Wyndham Lewis labeled Lawrence “a natural communist and born feminist” whose works are marked by “a sentimentalism like the smell of bad eggs” (qtd. in Arnold 172). Others from Christopher Caudwell to Kate Millett have charged that he is both fascist and sexist. More recently, Eagleton talks confidently of Lawrence's “most virulent sexism, racism and authoritarianism” (Literary Theory 42).

The Lawrence of the traditional critics could also be at best an intuitive vitalist and at worst a heavy-handed moralist. Ileana Cura-Sazdanic, for example, combines an uncritical allegiance to Leavis with a reading of Lawrence's essays and novels qua extended quotation with minimal commentary. Gamini Salgado also invokes an exemplary Leavis and argues that Lawrence's criticism “had only one function: to act as a safety valve for Lawrence himself” (55). Others like Kate Millett and Biyot Tripathy comb the essays and novels (often without regard to source, situation or speaker) in order to confirm precast notions of biography and authorial intention. There is a reductive intentionalism, itself seen as unitary, and an attendant formalism, which leads such commentary, in Peter Bien's view, to “reduce Lawrence's criticism, whether moral or aesthetic, to a system … into a more-or-less ordered whole” (127; emphasis mine) and thus to neutralize the force of what he has to say.

While critics allow that Lawrence's fictional works incorporate criticism of his ideas, many like Hilary Simpson and Richard White equate the criticism with dogmatism. Even when Lawrence's criticism is treated thoughtfully and sympathetically by Richard Swigg and Colin Clarke, it is still seen as important primarily for the light it sheds on his fiction. Even a doyen of Lawrence scholarship, Harry T. Moore, did little to change the critical climate, employing an impoverished critical vocabulary—“artistic prose can have a life of its own, with elements beyond the ordinary: rhythm, color, and image”—to contrast Lawrence's “mixed prose” with the “grocery-list prose” of undifferentiated modern novelists (248). The persistence and prominence of such Lawrence scholarship owes much to institutional practices of the profession, its associations and journals. Even otherwise helpful deconstructive readings by Daniel J. Schneider and Gerald Doherty tend to read Lawrence's critical essays in the interests of his fiction, leaving in place “the hierarchy of genres” that so informs Lawrence criticism, as David Ellis and Howard Mills argue.

Because the reputation of D. H. Lawrence has thus tended to prescribe/proscribe certain forms of curiosity, it seems timely to connect Lawrence's critical stance and deconstruction: to explore how deconstruction may contest the authority still exercised by Eliot and Leavis, to focus not on the “Romantic” aspects of his critical essays (as David J. Gordon has done), but to elaborate difference in his texts, especially those that have been marginalized. “The books exist,” Lawrence insists in his preface to Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs; “But they are shoved down into oblivion by the common will-to-forget” (Phoenix 267). Lawrence implicitly speaks to the question of canon formation when he advocates in his preface the re-publication of books that record the “colonizing” and “civilizing” of America but have been deemed inadequate exemplars of the dominant American success story.

Lawrence directs readers to the so-called margins of texts, to the rhetorical resolution of ideological predicaments: “A great deal of the meaning of life and of art lies in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses, the unimportant passages. They are truly passages, the places of passing over” (Phoenix 248). “We have,” he says elsewhere, “thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness. Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness” (Symbolic Meaning 17). Although Lawrence disdains a concern with origins and ends and dismisses as “puerile” the belief that science exhausts “the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge,” he is aware of the appeal of order, of the heuristic imperative “to make a start somehow” (Psychoanalysis 12, 21; emphasis mine).

A not untypical instance of critical undervaluing of Lawrence's “revisionary impulse” (Gilbert 80) concerns his much cited and most Carlylean call to action:

The Word is uttered, most of it: we need only pay true attention. … It is the Deed of life we have now to learn: we are supposed to have learnt the Word, but, alas, look at us. Word-perfect we may be, but Deed-demented.

(Phoenix II 510)

This passage is usually read, like Carlyle's in Sartor Resartus, as an emphatic valorizing of the deed at the expense of the word. Yet, just as Carlyle advocates the exchange of one book for another—“Close thy Byron. Open thy Goethe.”—so Lawrence appropriates biblical hermeneutics with a difference, in urging a shift in forms of attention, from hearkening to a gospel to learning how to live an active life. Lawrence's desire for radical change is captured effectively in the contrast between sterile perfection and energizing dementia.

Yet this is not the whole story, and naive activism seems to be the furthest thing from Lawrence's mind. In this key statement he is paying a powerful tribute to the power of texts and to the problems of textuality and interpretation. His first qualification (“most of it”)—a qualification that even Schneider neglects in his deconstructive reading of this passage (42)—alludes economically to the current incompleteness and instability of biblical texts and the meanings they authorize. The implication seems to be that Scripture has been as effectively attended to as is possible, and yet there has been little change in the lives of those who look to it for guidance. Lawrence's subsequent concession—“Word-perfect we may be”—is therefore doubly vulnerable: first, because the perfection claimed is no perfection since it can never complete itself; second, because mere attentiveness is not enough to guarantee that any message will be either properly understood or effectively acted upon (“we are supposed to have learnt the Word”). The specter of lip service haunts this whole passage, but so too does a basic ambivalence towards texts as determining action.

As Lawrence presents it, a sacred text such as the Bible has been understood as having the power to regulate people's lives, but it has apparently failed to effect either spiritual or social reformation. And yet, despite the implication that we should not put too much faith in the didactic, transformative powers of any book, Lawrence's alternative, “the Deed of life,” single and uppercase, is represented as at least in part a quasi-legal text. The Deed is what is written and read, as well as what is done. So much for an unproblematic activism, a quick clean break with the authority of the past. If action is not to be irrational, then it cannot wholly sever its ties with textuality and reading; if we are not to be “deed-demented,” we must constantly revise our dependence on writing, reading and other forms of action.

Another key text that proves difficult to appreciate from a narrowly formalist perspective is Study of Thomas Hardy, or Le Gai Savaire—to Leavis, one of those texts supposedly “tossed off … in the most marginal way” (“Approaches” 284). Written in 1914 and revised over a period of three years but published in complete form only in 1936, the Study is a challenge to those critics who would police disciplinary and generic categories. “Out of sheer rage,” Lawrence begins his book: “It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad.” Soon it is “more or less—very much less—about Thomas Hardy,” and becomes even “a sort of Confessions of my Heart” (Letters 2: 212, 222, 235). Lawrence's text does not assume a privileged status as a “pure” discourse freed from the “contaminations” of literature, and guaranteeing a special brand of knowledge. A notion of authorial intention is both assumed and resisted in his own practice, while Lawrence remains “acutely aware that all statements, even his own, were relative and provisional” (Freeman 3). Anticipating his critics, Lawrence opens the third chapter of his Study: “This is supposed to be a book about the people in Thomas Hardy's novels. But if one wrote everything they give rise to it would fill the Judgement Book” (20).

The reflexive turn of Lawrence's critical practice insists, like that of Jacques Derrida or the French feminists, on its own situatedness, eschewing the naturalized neutrality and authority of a disingenuous plain style. “There is no straight path between you and me,” Lawrence assures his reader: “so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears” (Psychoanalysis 25). It is Lawrence's challenge to discursive norms (especially when he invades the disciplinary strongholds of science and philosophy) that is confined or trivialized by those who would see his style as a symptom of carelessness or arrogance.

Yet neither would Lawrence want to be tolerated for any reason; as he warns Bertrand Russell: “I don't want you to put up with my talk, when it is foolish, because you think perhaps it is passionate” (Letters 2: 295). In similar fashion, in a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, he scorns those who would confine him within the margins of his fictions: “They then say, I—D. H. L. am wonderful, I am an exceedingly valuable personality, but that the things I say are extravaganzas, illusions. They say I cannot think” (Letters 2: 380). From Lawrence's point of view, an Arnoldian or Eliotic disinterest is only another less ingenuous way of disguising one's biases: “Self -effacement is quite as self-conscious, and perhaps even more conceited than letting oneself go” (Phoenix 248). Nor could the reader Lawrence envisions ever be confused with the modernist model of passivity and self-effacement: “After all, the world is not a stage—not to me. … But whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it—if he wants a safe seat in the audience—let him read somebody else” (Letters 5: 201).

For Lawrence style is significantly related to sense, although he subscribes to no theory of expressive or significant form and repudiates the jargon of authenticity. In “Introduction to these Paintings” Lawrence exposes what he sees as the ideological ugliness of Clive Bell's belief in significant form: Bell's appeal to “aesthetic ecstasy” is compared to “another great uplift into self-importance, another apotheosis of personal conceit; especially when accompanied by a lot of jargon about the pure world of reality existing behind the veil of this vulgar world of accepted appearances, and of the entry of the elect through the doorway of visual art” (Phoenix 566). In a letter to Gordon Campbell (20 December 1914), Lawrence distinguishes such a view from the sort of truth he values: “All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true: Ecstasy achieves itself by virtue of exclusion; and in making any passionate exclusion, one has already put one's right hand in the hand of the lie” (Letters 2: 247).

In “Art and Morality” (1925) Lawrence explores problems of perception, reception and representation, of reading as ideology, and emphasizes the social construction of the subject, the social production and reception of the text. For Lawrence, the reception of Cézanne in particular raises questions about the grounds of resistance, “the common clap-trap, that ‘art is immoral’,” which he then analyzes in almost de Manian fashion: “the bourgeois is supposed to be the fount of morality. Myself, I have found artists far more morally finicky.” Art, Lawrence suggests, best illustrates the subtly distinguished feeling for what is moral and what immoral. In the “moral instinct of the man in the street” lies the sedimentation of social mores, that moral instinct “largely an emotional defence of an old habit.” What is it, Lawrence asks, about a Cézanne still-life that can so arouse: “What ancient habit in man do these six apples and a water-pitcher succeed in hindering?” The view that “I could do better myself!” is so familiar as not to require quotation marks in the text; but why then, Lawrence persists, is the picture not simply dismissed as “a poor attempt?” Why such extreme reactions? The physical objects themselves can scarcely “suggest improper behaviour. They don't—not even to a Freudian.” The Freudian explanation, historically specific and socially controlled, is insufficient. Artistic expression proves more inconvenient, less easily incorporated: “Where, then, does the immorality come in? Because come in it does” (Study 163).

Lawrence explains the problem in terms of a dominant visual epistemology, the desire for specular innocence—the “slowly-formed habit of seeing just as the photographic camera sees.” The problematic of representation is everywhere. The more historically pervasive influence of visual epistemology combines with technology in the form of the kodak in the continued search for a stable, subject-centered reality: “Through many ages, mankind has been striving to register the image of the retina as it is: no more glyphs and hieroglyphs. We'll have the real objective reality.” The kind of metaphysical desire that the search represents, Lawrence makes clear, is exacted at the cost of violence, of effacement and exclusion: the sovereign subject is “a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest is just setting, background.” The Cézanne still-life meets with such resistance because it assaults the pretensions of “the all-seeing human eye which is now the Eternal Eye” (Study 164-66).

If you reduce art to decor, to “tactile values” or to significant form, you “might as well force your guest to eat the menu card, at the end of the dinner.” In such a modernist esthetic theory as that of Bell, there is thus a depleted notion of text, a pale shadow of a nourishing reality. What Lawrence proposes in its place is no model of substitution but of unfolding difference; not abandonment of connection but a process of discovering an always changing reality: “And nothing is true, or good, or right, except in its own living relatedness to its own circumambient universe; to the things that are in the stream with it” (Study 166-67). Not even a scientist could hope for a privileged perspective, not now that Einstein, to Lawrence's delight, has taken out “the pin which fixed down our fluttering little physical universe” (Letters 4: 37).

The act of rereading is of special interest to Lawrence in his last and unrevised major publication, Apocalypse, an iconoclastic exposure of the failure of Christian and democratic idealism. Lawrence's words are far from being what Mara Kalnins terms “a last testament of his belief in the symbolic value of art as the way to creative integration” (Introduction 24). What makes Revelation so compelling for Lawrence is its inscription of history and its lack of unitary meaning: “It has meanings. Not meaning within meaning: but rather, meaning against meaning” (48). His is no naively nostalgic or Utopian project for the recovery of loss: “We can never recover an old vision, once it has been supplanted. But what we can do is to recover a new vision in harmony with the memories of the old, far-off experience that lie within us” (54). Moreover, as Lawrence explains, renewed enthusiasm for the Bible is born of Moffat's translation and recent research and criticism. Such scholarly work has released him from the moral pieties of institutionalized readings, not to recover an old vision but to reveal “the very quick of ancient history” (55). Real interest is what is lost when “a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently” (60). Similarly, to Derrida: “Totally translatable, [the book] disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language [langue]. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately” (“Living” 102).

In rereading Revelation Lawrence finds political and religious ideology become one: “the revelation of the undying will-to-power in man, and its sanctification, its final triumph” (Apocalypse 67). What Christianity needs to recognize in recuperating the repressed in the text is that “Perhaps every rising civilisation must fiercely repudiate the passing civilisation. It is a fight within the self” (91; emphasis mine). Particularly crippling, in Lawrence's view, has been the desire for linear plotting, our “idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line” (97), which together with the urge for finality puts an end to curiosity: “The mind ‘understands’ and there's an end of it” (142).

Lawrence denies neither the possibility nor the necessity of assigning meaning, but rather any single meaning's claim to completeness. While meanings can be assigned to either symbol or myth, “you will never explain them away” (Apocalypse 142). Conventional habits of reading come at a cost: “Even Plato's Ideas are really rationalised nonsense. But they are still accepted, under the convention of Reason at any price, the Ideal, cost what it may” (197). Read against the grain, “as a book, not as a one-sided pronouncement,” Apocalypse dramatizes delusion and desire, revealing the human malady that we “cannot bear connection” (156, 148). As well, Apocalypse reveals a persistent desire, even as it is resisted, for “living wholeness”: “So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched” (149).

Lawrence was as aware of resistance to new ideas as de Man was of resistance to theory. In “Morality and the Novel,” Lawrence emphasizes that “to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance” (Study 175). A novelty, by contrast, that is no more than “a new grouping of clichés, a new arrangement of accustomed memories,” is readily assimilated because “it does not disturb the emotional and intuitive self” (Phoenix 576). Further, just as de Man stressed the difficulties of expressing theory “in intelligible ordinary language” (Resistance 27), so Lawrence was aware of the inadequacy of current modes of expression. Lawrence “finds it frightfully easy to theorise and say all the things I don't mean, and frightfully difficult to find out even for myself, what I do mean” (Letters 2: 105). A return to primitive and preconscious ways, were it possible, is not what Lawrence has in mind: “it is just puerile to sigh for innocence and naive spontaneity” (Phoenix II 624). It is equally clear that the writer cannot be cut off from tradition: hence Lawrence's quarrel with the Futurists. He welcomes their efforts to purge “the old forms and sentimentalities,” yet regrets their effort “to deny every scrap of tradition and experience, which is silly” (Letters 2: 180). Instead of returning to a fetishized artistic past, Lawrence recommends turning to “the unresolved, the rejected” (Phoenix 90).

Although such a course is fraught with dangers, Lawrence affirms the “absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general [which] makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man” (Psychoanalysis 15). For all his efforts to resist totalizing tendencies in Freud (who is “partly true,” Psychoanalysis 17) and the scientists as well as himself, and to emphasize that he offers no more than “my account of the Creation,” Lawrence finds himself apologizing for “bordering on mysticism” (Psychoanalysis 23). The desire to make sense, to connect particular and universal, persists nonetheless, although Lawrence acts upon it not by denying or suppressing but by accommodating the physical, sensual and intuitive. We are to have “more sense,” but not in a narrowly rational way (Letters 1: 544.)

Lawrence knows that the old order cannot be finally undone: there is a “constant war, I reckon, between new expression and the habituated” (Letters 2: 104). Similarly, Derrida reminds us: “Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in the old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone” (Positions 24). Although, like Derrida and de Man, Lawrence would not have criticism become a science, yet insofar as we view always “in the light of a theory,” he stresses the obligation to admit candidly and clearly that this is inevitably the case: “Then it seems to me, a good critic should give his reader a few standards to go by. He can change his standards for every new critical attempt, so long as he keeps good faith. But it is just as well to say: This, and this, is the standard we judge by” (Study 209).

To advocate any critical position or approach is to run risks. Deconstruction in particular has no built-in defense against blindness and habits of exclusion, as Barbara Johnson has made clear in her discussion of the Yale school as a male school (World 32-44). Indeed, all reading and writing demands, however provisionally, some notion of closure or limitation of the text, as Derrida argues in “Living On.” In reading Lawrence in the light of deconstruction, as I have done, my purpose is not to master his texts but rather to encourage consideration of what Johnson calls “the subtle, powerful effects of difference already at work within the illusion of a binary opposition” (Critical Difference xi), so that antitheses between mind and body, word and deed, masculine and feminine, can be undone in response to—rather than as an assault on—Lawrence's texts.

Aware of the dangers of reconceiving the canon in our own critical image, I am disinclined to change the plumed serpent into another boa-deconstructor like members of the Yale school. Lawrence's critical writings are shaped by his own time and place—and the earlier works with which they debate and from which they depart. He participated in the struggles for legitimacy which marked the modernist era, and thus while Lawrence can be usefully reread in the light of deconstructive theories, his insights are not reducible to them. Despite his many concessions to the instability of identity and the incompleteness of knowledge, his discourse nevertheless testifies to the tenacity of authorial selfhood and moral categories. In his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Lawrence accommodates competing possibilities and conflicting meanings in a modified or attenuated form of deconstruction which must reserve a place for enduring identity and the agency that it makes possible. Thus, Lawrence does not reduce conflict to a property of texts, to the necessities of a linguistic system such as Barbara Johnson describes in her introduction to Derrida's Dissemination: “the necessity with which what [the author] does see is systematically related to what he does not see” (xv). To Lawrence, a writer like Benjamin Franklin “knew what he was about, the sharp little man” (20) and accordingly can be held responsible.

Studies in Classic American Literature has been widely regarded as representing Lawrence the critic at his best, attracting in the American critical scene “many avowed disciples” (Colacurcio 488). Lawrence's appeal in America may owe something to the renegade character of his texts, a feature that triggers the “cultural reflex of sympathy for the outlaw” and which Robert Scholes also detects in the appeal of Derridean thought in the American academy (278). Nevertheless, American responses to Lawrence's criticism have often proven as problematic in their assimilative capacities as British responses in their protective propensities. When Lawrence's achievement as a critic is not clothed in mystery—“somehow wrong yet somehow brilliant” (Colacurcio)—it is aligned with totalizing gestures and assigned a harmonizing and legitimizing function radically at odds with Lawrence's sense of what criticism should do. Edmund Wilson, for example, argues that Lawrence has done “what it would be difficult for an American to do: read our books for their meaning in the life of the Western World as a whole. And his studies mark the moment when Europe first begins to look toward America … for new ideas to sustain European civilisation” (qtd. in Arnold 77-79; emphasis mine).

Lawrence's critical practice is at odds with such cultural conservatism and revitalization of the old; instead of any retreat from history, his works call for a radical rethinking of relations and possibilities. Similarly, deconstruction does not, as has been alleged, simply deny identity, reference, intentionality, but rather constitutes them as possible but always problematic. Derrida insists on accountability, on our situation in discourse where boundaries and conceptual differences are endlessly affirmed and contested. In “The Principle of Reason,” furthermore, Derrida emphasizes “the political and institutional conditions” of work (3), our historical and linguistic context and the possibilities for responsibility and affirmation. The Derridean stress on the play of difference, on the residually elusive and unruly character of discourse, need not leave us fearing, with E. D. Hirsch, “an hypostatization that is nothing in particular at all” (249). Hirsch mistakes inexhaustibility for relativism and thus fails to see how deconstruction can provide an opportunity to pursue knowledge in the awareness, more or less partial, of the constraints on all such pursuits.

It is precisely their challenge to the “natural order of things” as defined by a modernist esthetic that leads to reductive or otherwise recuperative readings of both Lawrence and deconstruction, whereas if scholars are to make a difference in the institutional, cultural, political scene, they need to reread and rethink relations between texts and contexts in the ways suggested by Lawrence and deconstruction; they need to reconsider the privileges and prospects of literature and the plausibility of claims to closure. If deconstructive practice has not always realized its potential to politicize the esthetic in a new way, to extend or otherwise to rewrite the canon, such failure is not endemic to “theory.” Nor is it time to announce the death of deconstruction. Jeffrey Williams acknowledges that de Man remains an embarrassment to, as well as an invaluable resource for, deconstruction in America. Arguing that “deconstruction is not dead but is still operative in the theories that currently hold the field” (1165), Williams challenges us to come to terms with de Man's unsettling legacy and not to recuperate deconstruction by scapegoating the de Man of the war journals.

It is nevertheless true that deconstruction has often continued to work within the canon established by Eliot and his successors, and even to affect their imperious manner. A comfortable academic deconstruction has thus found a fashionable avenue to reputation and reward in the North American academy. Indeed, where to locate such critics in Pierre Bourdieu's contrast between the “orthodox” and the “heretics” becomes difficult at times: “between on the one hand, actors who tend to conservatism, to defend … the established symbolic order and the academic institutions that reproduce that order, and on the other hand, those who incline to heretical breaks, to criticism of established forms, to the subversion of current models, and to a return to original purity” (545). In order to translate strategies of reading into fruitful or effective rewriting of the social scene, academic deconstructionists can profit from the activist orientation of Lawrence. Despite his successes he remained alienated from institutions of power, and his cultural criticism remained closely connected to “the Deed of life.”

There is, then, a double benefit in remaking Lawrence's reputation in the context of deconstruction. His critical writings are exercises in “learning to squint,” learning to look obliquely at that which has not been duly regarded; he warns too that his “keen essays,” products of enthusiasm and acuity, will hurt even as they inform—“cut your fingers if you don't handle them carefully” (Letters 3: 156). Similarly, as Lawrence saw it, “while there's a human being left on earth the last word will never be said about anything” (Letters 4: 242-43). Thus just as he never pretended to know “all America”—“I never said I knew all America: or all about it. God forbid! and keep on forbidding!” (Letters 5: 198)—so we need continually to acknowledge the difference that for Barbara Johnson “makes all totalization of the identity of the self or the meaning of a text impossible” (World 4).

Note

1. Compare the printing histories of Eliot's and Lawrence's major critical texts. According to Gallup's bibliography, The Sacred Wood went through 7 editions between 1920 and 1950 and 3 reprints before the 1960 University Paperback (rpt. 1964, 1966); a 2nd English edition of Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932) was published in 1934 (rpt. 1941, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948, 1949), before the 1951 3rd edition (rpt. 1953). In contrast, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) was reprinted only in 1931 (New York), 1933 (London), and 1964 before the 1971 paperback; Phoenix (1936) was reprinted in a cheap edition in 1938 and not again until 1961, 1968, (paperback) 1978; Phoenix II (1968) was reprinted only in paperback, 1978; Fantasia (1922) was reprinted in 1923, 1930 (Penguin rpt.), 1971, 1974; Study of Thomas Hardy published in 1936 in Phoenix was reprinted in paperback only in 1973, before the Cambridge UP edition of 1985 (Roberts). Of anthologies of Lawrence's essays, Aldington's Penguin is exceptional in its very large print run: 40,000 copies (Roberts 196).

   Consider, too, Eliot's and Lawrence's relative representation in theory anthologies and critical histories. René Wellek's English Criticism, 1900-1950 is not untypical: discussion of Lawrence is included in a chapter on “The New Romantics” (116-28), while Eliot, who is described as “by far the most important critic of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world,” is the exclusive focus of a whole chapter (176-220).

I gratefully acknowledge the support of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the research for and preparation of this essay.

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