Научная статья на тему 'The Subversion of linear time in ''Sons and Lovers'' by D. H. Lawrence'

The Subversion of linear time in ''Sons and Lovers'' by D. H. Lawrence Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

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АНГЛИЙСКАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА / ENGLISH LITERATURE / Д.Г. ЛОУРЕНС / D.H. LAWRENCE / МОДЕРНИЗМ / MODERNISM / РЕАЛИЗМ / REALISM / ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЕ ВРЕМЯ / ART TIME / РОМАН / NOVEL / BILDUNGSROMAN / CHARACTER / ПСИХОЛОГИЗМ / РОМАН ВОСПИТАНИЯ

Аннотация научной статьи по языкознанию и литературоведению, автор научной работы — Proskurnin Boris M.

The essay is devoted to the issues of art time in one of the most known novels of D.H. Lawrence. The issues of time were central for the modernist writers since they showed the prevalence of an individual's experience of life over the life itself; they were preoccupied with proper depicting of a person's inner living through external circumstances, especially when a young hero enters the world, perceives it and experiences heavy growth costs as it happens with the main character of 'Sons and Lovers'. The novel under analysis is constructed on the basis of several genetic plot patterns: socio-panoramic, biographical and autobiographical and psycho-analytical, and each of them influences the time-structure of the novel. The essay shows how a complex temporal structure a unity of family, biographical, personal time and socio-historical time, epic time, transpersonal, eternal time works in the novel and determines its general artistic peculiarities. The author argues that D.H. Lawrence, for the purpose of giving the fullest, by his account, picture of the main character's internal conversion of the events of his growing up, unites traditional (realistic) and experimental (modernist) temporal paradigms, having kept general linear forward time-movement, retards, or/and hastens the flux of narrated time.

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Текст научной работы на тему «The Subversion of linear time in ''Sons and Lovers'' by D. H. Lawrence»

2015 РОССИЙСКАЯ И ЗАРУБЕЖНАЯ ФИЛОЛОГИЯ Вып. 2(30)

УДК 821.111-31

THE SUBVERSION OF LINEAR TIME IN 'SONS AND LOVERS' BY D.H. LAWRENCE1

Boris M. Proskurnin

Professor, Head of the Department of World Literature and Culture Perm State University

15, Bukireva st., Perm, 614990, Russia. [email protected]

The essay is devoted to the issues of art time in one of the most known novels of D.H. Lawrence. The issues of time were central for the modernist writers since they showed the prevalence of an individual's experience of life over the life itself; they were preoccupied with proper depicting of a person's inner living through external circumstances, especially when a young hero enters the world, perceives it and experiences heavy growth costs as it happens with the main character of 'Sons and Lovers'. The novel under analysis is constructed on the basis of several genetic plot patterns: socio-panoramic, biographical and autobiographical and psycho-analytical, and each of them influences the time-structure of the novel. The essay shows how a complex temporal structure - a unity of family, biographical, personal time and socio-historical time, epic time, transpersonal, eternal time - works in the novel and determines its general artistic peculiarities. The author argues that D.H. Lawrence, for the purpose of giving the fullest, by his account, picture of the main character's internal conversion of the events of his growing up, unites traditional (realistic) and experimental (modernist) temporal paradigms, having kept general linear forward time-movement, retards, or/and hastens the flux of narrated time.

Key words: English literature; D.H. Lawrence; modernism; realism; art time; novel; Bildungsroman; character.

D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) seems to be not so much read and analyzed as his Women in Love (1921) or Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) [see: Roberts, Poplawski 2001]. But still it is one of the most popular novels of his and quite well thought of by the critics through the whole hundred years of its existence2. It is traditionally looked at as the first novel in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. It is liked by many due to its intimate narration of life in the times of crucial changes when former social and moral values were challenged by modernity. It is the novel in which some crucial peculiarities of D.H. Lawrence's art are displayed with their bright vividness and clearness. At the same time, it is the novel where the author works out some new principles of character- and milieu-depicting, which no longer ties him so soundly to the tradition of the XIX century novel: The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love are the novels, as we all know, of another type to much extent. As Michael Bell argues, some episodes in Sons and Lovers (for example, the scene with Mrs. Morel being driven out the house by a drunk hus-

© Proskurnin B.M., 2015

band in the garden at night and the love-making scene of Clara and Paul) 'anticipate the mature Lawrence' [Bell 2003: 136].

The issues of Time are, no doubt, core issues of the ideology of modernism and the fiction of the period [see: Ushakova 2010]. Practically it has become a commonplace in any study of the modernist literature to refer to the works of Henry Bergson and Albert Einstein with their ideas of subjectivity and relativity of time [see: Bradbury, MacFarlane 1976]. These ideas influenced immensely the writers of the period, who were very much preoccupied with the aspects of time, with its subjectivization through the minds of depicted characters, with predominant asymmetrical relations of the past, present and future times in inner world of a literary hero, which results in various shifts along the time coordinate. There are some principal peculiarities of art time in English modernist fiction analyzed in the interesting essay of Elizaveta Brezhneva 'Outer Time' and 'Inner Time' in Poetics of Virginia Woolf's Novels' [Brezhneva 2011]. The author of the essay argues that English modernists'

temporal structures are tied together with the characteristics of English national mentality: 'amalgam of traditions and moderateness - on the one hand, individualism, on the other', what, by Brezhneva, 'clarifies peculiar, ambivalent concept of time, formed in the mind of an English native speaker' [Brezhneva 2011: 226]. It is obvious that 'inner time' means and matters much more for English modernists than 'external' ('outer') time. It is especially true when we speak about 'the novel of emergence of the individual', in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin, into the category of which we may rank Sons and Lovers.

Thinking about Sons and Lovers, we could not help remembering Virginia Woolfs remark of this novel and of its artistic world - she called it 'Nottingham cosmos' (Woolf 1989: 543). If it is so, this cosmos has to have its space and its time. This 'cosmos' of D.H. Lawrence is based on some specific chronotope, to use the term of Mikhail Bakhtin. This chronotope is constructed to unite two things, which, by Lawrence, is the essence of a human being's life: internal and external, apparent and hidden, covert. Many critics see the novel's strength and peculiarity just in this unity: 'here D.H. Lawrence most of all his previous works reaches his aesthetic ideal -i.e. equilibrium of these two things (internal and external)' [Mikhalskaya 1998: 89].

The novel is constructed on the basis of several genetic plot patterns: socio-panoramic (Thomas Hardy's one as the closest, as many critics write), biographical (in some way autobiographical), psycho-analytical, and each of them influences the time-structure in the novel. We may say that, on the one hand, Lawrence depicts 'a story of a typical young man of his time, one who suffered from a widespread malaise, the conflict with his parents' generation' [Finney 1990: 15] (there are three sons in conflict with the father in the novel; i.e. Lawrence multiplies this generic opposition), and on the other hand - he tries to 'place the individual characters and incidents into some timeless pattern of human behaviour' [Finney 1990: 15]. The latter brings us to the conclusion that a priori the novel will have a complex temporal structure - a unity of family, biographical, personal time and socio-historical time (perhaps not so much distinct), epic time, transpersonal, eternal time.

Two parts of the novel seem to be different in terms of their temporal grounds. The first part is based on the linear time-pattern due to the closeness of the narrative to Bildungsroman and to biographical mode. The second part is based on a lyrical temporal structure, when time is just included in a massive of psychological and private process of life per-

ception. But because these both parts tell about a young man's entering life irrespective of their different temporal intentions and different time-speed, they are united by the idea of the movement of time from some past to some future, by the idea of time continuity.

Bildungsroman pattern determines chronological way of organizing the novel's chronotope. The very title of the first chapter of the novel, The Early Married Life of the Morels, implies the linear temporal structure, to be exact - predominance of so called 'family time' (again in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin, used by the critic for the analysis of the Bildungsro-man's genesis). In Mikhail Bakhtin's essay Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism there are five modifications of Bildungsroman. If we follow Bakhtin's definitions, Sons and Lovers could be regarded as the third type - Bakhtin called such novels as 'biographical or autobiographical novels', which are characterized by the picture of a hero's formation as a personality within the biographical time-pattern, this process of formation of a character goes through strictly individual stages. As Bakhtin argues, 'Emergence here is the result of the entire totality of changing life circumstances and events, activity and work. <...> The emergence of man's life-destiny fuses with the emergence of man himself [Bakhtin 1986: 22]. On the list of such types of Bildungsroman Bakhtin puts Fielding's 'Tom Jones' and Dickens's 'David Copperfield'. According to Bakhtin, time in this type of a novel first of all demonstrates itself through the images of the Nature: the Sun and the Stars circulation, perceptible and visual Seasons' marks, etc. At the same time, when we speak about events, social activities and works, we understand that socio-historical time plays its serious role too. It means that no writer of a Bildungsroman could avoid depicting social, cultural and everyday-life and moral and manners signs. It also means that, temporally speaking, such a novel is a complex time texture, where historical, personal, eternal, real and the like times co-exist and co-work. It is true for the novel of D.H. Lawrence under our analysis.

Pre-Morel and early-Morel time, given in the first chapter, is developed (reconstructed) within the author's narration with the idea that time is inevitable in its movement onwards; this idea unites two parts of the novel despite the fact that they prove it on different basis. We read in the novel: 'Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over' [Lawrence 1981: 13]. But in the first chapter Lawrence already seems to break this pattern and tends to a different temporal

organization of the plot and its narration, when readers 'travel' back and forth along the timeline. Having in mind the general time vector, Lawrence quite resolutely travels along it, using either retrospective or prospective points of view: 'To her dying day, for thirty-five years, she did not speak of him' (her first love John Field) [Lawrence 1981: 16]. In terms of the author's temporal position, he moves (and readers with him do the same) back along the timeline, and by this moment we already know that Mrs. Morel is married, has a son, William by name, and a daughter, Anni, and is pregnant with another baby. Practically, the following thought of Gertrude looks prospective in terms of temporality (put by the writer as indirect speech): 'And looking ahead, the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive' [Lawrence 1981: 12]. This idea of 'prospect' becomes a leading one in the early chapters of the novel when Gertrude understands her mistake of marriage to Morel. Or: 'There began a battle between the husband and a wife - a fearful, bloody battle that ended only with the death of one [Lawrence 1981: 23].

Or (when William brings from London an umbrella for her as a present): 'She kept it to her dying day, and would have lost anything rather than that' [Lawrence 1981: 104]. Remarkably, when Paul began to work at Mr. Jordan's and that was his first day there and Mrs. Morel was waiting for his coming back home, D.H. Lawrence writes: 'But she herself had had to put up with so much that she expected her children to take the same odds. They must go through with what came. And Paul stayed at Jordan's, although all the time he was there his health suffered from the darkness and lack of air and the long hours' [Lawrence 1981: 137]. Here we have one more example of prospection: both Mrs. Morel and the author look into the future of Paul. Within the narration about William's growing up, before Paul's birth, the author uses rather loose time structure. After Paul comes into this world, the narration becomes more determined in terms of time and space. Thus, we understand that the protagonist of the novel is Paul, not William or anybody else. Though even in the narration concerning Paul we may meet the cases of retrospection, for example the scene of getting father's money in Chapter IV 'The Young Life of Paul'. It is given without any definite tie to the concrete time; it is just said by the author that 'the colliers of the five pits were paid on Fridays' [Lawrence 1981: 89] and one of these Fridays is described - somewhen before the narrative moment when Lawrence starts to tell about this. And it is included in the series of actions of the same sort done by other Morel's children before Paul. This

scene is given with a distinct emotional colouring by a small boy frightened and lost among so many grown-ups, and, what is more important, full of responsibility which burdens on him. The scene is depicted in the manner of close-ups and from the perspective of a scared kid. Both time and space are perceived here with stressed personal attitude, being just endured by the personage. This is one of the examples of the temporal thing which may be called 'biographical time'. Here is one more example of this kind of time with another genesis of the personal 'colouring'. Mrs. Morel is said about in the beginning of the first chapter after her quarrel with the husband: 'She remembered the scene all her life, as one in which she had suffered most intensely' [Lawrence 1981: 24].

At the same time, Part One could be characterized as the one structured on points of real time -stages of the two sons' growing up. We may just look at the third chapter and the beginnings of the overwhelming majority of the paragraphs in it: they are, in this way or another, time-markers of definite 'real' time (family time): 'During the next week...', 'This time, however...', 'The weeks passed', 'Then he was indignant', 'Now, with the birth of the third baby.', 'During his recuperation.', 'Meanwhile William grew bigger and stronger and more active...', 'And then...', 'At dinner time.', 'But that evening...', 'When the children were old enough.', 'Then, when the lad was thirteen.', 'Then, he began to get ambitious', 'Then he came home angry with his mother.', 'There ended the altercation.', 'When she was nineteen.', 'William remained a year at his new post in Nottingham', 'A few days before his departure'- he was just twenty - .', 'Soon there was a heap of twisted black pages.'. These time-clamps organize the narration as a whole and imply the movement onwards since children are growing and parents are becoming older.

There are some narrative points quite interesting to interpret: 'Already he was getting a big boy. Already he was top of the class, and the master said he was the smartest lad in the school' [Lawrence 1981: 63]. These two 'alreadys' mark that the narration is given through Mrs. Morel's point of view (the domineering narrative voice of Part One). It marks also the fact of family time domineering, i.e. time is measured by Mother with the help of changes in her sons' growing up. Since the main narrative voice in Part One is that of Mrs. Morel, it travels' back and forth and complicates the temporal pattern of the narration. It is the narrative policy in the chapter 'The Casting off of Morel - the Taking on of William' and in the next chapter - 'The Young Life of Paul', as well as in the chapter 'Death in the Fam-

ily', where the very beginning of it starts with the landmarks of the third son's, Arthur's, growing up: 'Arthur Morel was growing up'. And we read further: 'But as he grew older his temper became uncertain'. Or: 'So that Arthur, who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, hated him worst of all' [Lawrence 1981: 142; 143].

In the chapters which follow (up to the end of Part One) it is easy to notice that Mrs. Morel measures time-passing by events (successes, failures) of her children, the closer to the second part, the more - by the events of Paul's life, to a definite extent preparing readers to be aware of some special closeness of the Mother and her second son.

There are many examples in the novel when time is structured with the help of the psychological state of the personages, when even the space is measured by specific perception of the time: 'The sixteen slow miles of railway journey passed' [Lawrence 1981: 117] (when Paul and Gertrude went to Nottingham for settling Paul as the clerk at Mr. Jordan's; nervousness of both is quite understandable; but what is remarkable: the agitation of Paul, i.e. his point of view, is the thing that determines the narrative tone here. It is obvious when D.H. Lawrence writes a bit later: 'The town was strange and delightful to them. But the boy was tied up inside in a knot of apprehension. He dreaded the interview with Thomas Jordan' [Lawrence 1981: 117]. This manner of 'privatizing' (subjectivization) of the time that moves forward (its psychological colouring) becomes even more obvious when we read the closing passages of Chapter VI 'Paul Launches into Life': 'So the time went along happily enough. The factory had a homely feel. No one was rushed or driven. Paul always enjoyed it when the work got faster, towards post-time, and all the men united in labour' [Lawrence 1981: 141]. The end of this chapter is quite peculiar in terms of Lawrence's mastery of making congruent individual (biographical) time and epic time, when he puts together Paul's climbing up the hill to his home in the evenings and so called 'big life' with its 'villages five or six miles away, that shown like swarms of glittering living things, almost a heaven against his feet', 'a great train rushing south to London or north, to Scotland' [Lawrence 1981: 141], i.e. big life (and time too) moves on and on, and his life, as a small part of it, moves on too. It is not just like in the prose of Marcel Proust, where epic moments are situated within lyrical narrative wholeness, especially if we compare Proust's style and that of the first part of Sons and Lovers. But it is on the move to this direction, mostly - in the second part of the novel.

Temporally speaking, it is quite notable that in the most dramatic chapter of the whole novel, but quite specifically - in the first part, which is centred around the death of William, in one of the most lyrical scenes between him and his mother, whose key-idea here is that her son holds his life in his own hands now and should rely on himself, they both all of a sudden notice: 'The clock ticked on; mother and son remained in silence' [Lawrence 1981: 164]. D.H. Lawrence, whose art, as we know, is full of symbols to lead a reader from the particular to the general, in a sense predicts the tragedy that will happen soon, as 'she saw the despair on his face' [Lawrence 1981: 164]. This is perhaps one of the rare references to a real clock in the novel. The next one, the most notable, is in the scene of the first visit of Paul to the house of Clara and her mother, after the theatre performance with Sarah Bernard in the main role, and their playing cards, when Paul was really counting each moment of being close to the woman to whom his desire was so much unbearable (see 'The clock struck one' - Lawrence 1981: 409) or, vice versa, he does not care about time enjoying the closeness of Clara in the scene of their walk in the fields [see: Lawrence 1981: 399].

The main time-indicators in the first part are the ages of the children (as it should be in the Bildungsroman) - mostly of William and Paul, rarely of Arthur and Annie. Closer to the end of the part, because all of them are already grown-ups, much of-tener we see such time-markers as the Seasons, Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, or local holiday -Goose Fair. It is a sort of introduction of a way of drawing timeline which becomes predominantly used in the second part. What is more, such time-markers, as 'sometimes' and 'occasionally', are widely used in the second part, let alone such as 'one Saturday afternoon', 'one evening in midsummer' [Lawrence 1981: 14], 'one day in March' [Lawrence 1981: 238], 'one morning' [Lawrence 1981: 311]. They seem to mark some definite day or moment and bring in the idea of the movement of time forward along the timeline, but as a matter of fact mean something which is ascribed to infinity, eternity? When we may answer the question 'When does it happen?' saying 'Now and always (or each March, each morning', etc. This corresponds with the writer's idea of a human being an integral part of cosmos. For example, when Paul and Clara visit the performance of Sarah Bernard, at one moment Paul looks at her and feels 'a kind of eternal look about her'[Lawrence 1981: 403]. Before that he notices 'eternal maidenhood' in Miriam [Lawrence 1981: 341].

When the verb 'grow' ('grew') is used in the second part of the novel, it is not for marking the age of the children, but for another kind of strengthening the endless flow of time within which Paul is looking for (searching for) his identity, sexual first of all, which has to put him in this endless and cosmic and eternal confluence with the laws of nature. Closer to the end of Chapter IX we read about Paul: 'He grew more and more restless. Miriam did not satisfy him. His old mad desire to be with her grew weaker' [Lawrence 1981: 305]. We see that in this case the verb 'grow' still has some temporal connotation but quite psychologically coloured. Sexual impatience of Paul to lose his virginity and his despair that time is moving on and he is still unable to respond to the call of nature (flesh and blood), or, as he explains to Miriam, 'blood heat' [Lawrence 1981: 274] are playing quite an important role in the second part, what is more - they direct the plot-construction in this part. Here we may say, that this sort of searching for himself is a kind of 'years of wandering', a compulsory for any Bildungsroman plot pattern. Paul wanders from one woman (mother) to another (Miriam) and to another (Clara). To characterize the second part, we may use the words of D.H. Lawrence himself when in 'Phoenix' he describes a human being's (and his own too) inner world as the 'dark continent', which is, to much extent, unexplainable; the writer stresses that human beings are doomed to see their psyche as 'the wilds of [their] essence' and when trying to understand oneself a man has to wander 'in the dark wilds of one's fate' [Lawrence 1936: 221]. Paul Morel is just such a personage, especially in the second part of the novel.

The leading leitmotif in terms of narrative temporal structure in this part of the novel is permanent addressing to this 'eternal time', which absorbs biographical time of the protagonist. It is not true that such idea does not exist in the first part, one of the examples of this congruency in the beginning of the novel is in its third chapter, and it concerns Mrs. Morel and her being a wife and a mother: 'And standing more aloof of him, not feeling him so much part of herself, but merely part of her circumstances.' [Lawrence 1981: 62]. Time is interpreted here as circumstances, as the idea of some eternal time, which is out of a human being's power and command. But it is only in the second part of the novel, id est after the death of the first son, and a kind of rebirth of Paul after his serious illness and after some peculiar changing in the mind of Mrs. Morel, who understands that while mourning over the elder son she could lose another one, where this ideology of total 'dissolving' of the time in the psychology of a personage, absorption of biographical

and family time by eternal everlasting time begins to prevail.

To say that there are no moments of using biographical time in the second part of the novel would not be true. We read about Paul in the beginning of Chapter X: 'When he was twenty-three years old, Paul sent in a landscape to the winter exhibition at Nottingham Castle. Miss Jordan had taken a good deal of interest in him, had invited him to her house, where he met other artists. He was beginning grow ambitious' [Lawrence 1981: 309]. The same happens with the family time. It is written on page 313: 'The family was coming on. Only Morel remained unchanged, or, rather, lapsed slowly' [Lawrence 1981: 313]. The inevitable movement of time is obvious in this part of the novel when we watch Mrs. Morel's becoming older and weaker: 'Mrs. Morel was tired. She began to give up at last; she had finished. She was in the way' [Lawrence 1981: 342]. In the second part of the novel these biographical and family time-markers do not just fix the process of children's growing up, they keep readers' attention to the successes or failures of the young members of the Morels, their gains and losses of various, mostly of psychological, personal and social, origin. 'Paul felt life changing around him. The conditions of youth were gone' [Lawrence 1981: 304]. In this respect the end of Chapter X is of peculiar interest. There is a dialogue between Paul and Clara about his, Paul's, affair with Miriam there. In this dialogue Paul mentions twice that Miriam and he have been together for already seven years. When Paul says that for the first time [Lawrence 1981: 338], he wants just to hurt Clara, to arise a sort of jealousy in her. The second time is of absolutely another sort: here by saying 'we are together for seven years' Paul tries to justify his incapacity to understand Miriam and true nature of her feelings towards him, as well as his fear to open his desire for Miriam, he tries to represent himself in favorable light in Clara's opinion [Lawrence 1981: 339].

But in general in this part of the novel there dominates the way of the author's work with the time which is visible in the first phrase of Chapter X 'The Test of Miriam': 'With the Spring came again the old madness and battle' [Lawrence 1981: 339]. I mean here the situation when the time and its discontinuity (realized through the author's choice of the period of time he wants to stop at or to describe) stands out as an important component of a psychological characteristic of a personage.

We all know that time in a novel could be characterized both as continuity and as discontinuity. It is because of this dialectics that, on the one hand, by and large, novelistic time is continuous in terms of

successive changes of temporal and spatial facts; but on the other hand, this continuum is broken up by author in discreet episodes. The choice of these episodes for depicting depends on aesthetic goals which author wants to achieve. This selectivity, which operates, once again, being dependent on author's artistic intentions, gives rise to the existence of some temporal lacunas in the narrative bulk of a novel, some time-compressions or, vice versa, some spread-outs of the plot-time, or any other author's subversions of linear time, which models real time with its one-dimensionality, continuity, irreversibil-ity, order. We understand that art time easily converts these qualities. The devices of art time, frequently used by D.H. Lawrence in the second part, are compressions (acceleration, speeding-up) and retardation of time, depending on the characters' psychological states, in other words - their personal feeling and their personal living through and living over events or emotional contexts and consequences of the events. I usually call such things - 'lyriciza-tion' of time (in Russia we often use such a term). Once again, it is not total lyrical epopee a la Proust, to whom, as we know, as well as to James Joyce, his attitude was quite complex. When Lawrence retards time and personalizes it, in terms of narration using character's point of view, for example, it does not necessarily mean one's travelling on the wave of one's memory. But it is his try to depict by all possible means, and by time and space-playing too, the full picture of emotional state of a personage. If we look at one of the walks of Paul into the woods in the chapter 'Release' when he is in agony of struggling within him through his wish of being free of the mystery of his affection to his mother, now dying of cancer, and therefore subconsciously he is waiting with painful impatience for her death, it is just an example of such sort of work with time and space: 'He wandered miles and miles. A smoky red sunset came on slowly, painfully, lingering. He thought he would die that day. There was a donkey that came up to him over the snow by the wood's edge, and put its head against him, and walked with him alongside. He put his arms round the donkey's neck, and stroked his cheeks against his ears' [Lawrence 1981: 477].

One more brilliant example of such work of D.H. Lawrence with time is in the beginning of Chapter XII 'Passion', I mean the famous episodes of Paul's impatient waiting for seeing Clara at Jordan's and his counting hours of Sunday while waiting for Monday when he gets chance to see Clara. That's why on Sunday 'slowly the hours crawled' [Lawrence 1981: 371], and when he walked to the station early on Monday, each mile seemed longer to

him and the number of them too large. His impatience grew and grew when he was too early at his office, and he began to count minutes when Clara might come: 'She would come in a half an hour!' [Lawrence 1981: 371]. Lawrence writes on, summing up Paul's inner state: 'All the morning things seemed a long way off, as they do to a man under chloroform' [Lawrence 1981: 371]. And absolutely vice versa, when Clara is with him, and he could enjoy her intimacy and her eternal womanhood, he does not notice the course of time. When they once walked in the fields, Paul refused to answer Clara's question what exact time was then; for him at that moment time meant nothing and he did not want to bother about it: he enjoyed love and (according to Lawrence's theory) felt himself an integral part of the eternal cosmos, Universe, greater harmony. Since the second part is just about this hero's search for his place in this kind of harmony based on the unity of spiritual and corporeal, internal and external, finite and infinite, the concept of time is subordinate to it. And it leads, in its turn, to a very loose and quite individual temporal structure in the novel, where the author, as many of them of the XX century, is very much free in his handling of time.

I'd like to finish my paper with a very remarkable thought of E.M. Forster on the issues of art time in the literature of the XX century in his 'Aspects of Novel' and the wish of some writers to 'forget' about it: 'Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily Bronte, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all...' [Forster].

D.H. Lawrence, while experimenting with art time, does not abolish it utterly, on the contrary, he plays with it, subordinating its various narrative representations in terms of length, order, intensity, scope and dimension 'to exploration of the unconscious and the impersonal in human life' [Finney 1990: 64].

Notes

1 The essay is based on the paper read by the author at the conference "2014 International D.H. Lawrence Conference. Time and Temporalities", held in Paris Quest University in Nanterre on 3rd-5th April, 2014.

2 See, for example, some most well-known works devoted exclusively to Sons and Lovers: [Black 1992]; [Harvey 1987]; [D.H. Lawrence 1977]; [D.H. Lawrence 2005]; [Murfin 1987]; [Shelley 1985]; [Twentieth-Century Interpretations 1970].

References

Bakhtin M.M. Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism // Bakhtin M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays / Translated by Vern W. McGee; edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Jolquist. Austen: University of Texas Press, 1986. P. 10-59.

BellM. D.H. Lawrence and the Meaning of Modernism // Rethinking Modernism / Edited by Marianne Thormalen. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. P. 132-148.

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Михальская Н.П. Дэвид Герберт Лоуренс: радуга чувств и правда повседневности // Дудова Л.В., Михальская Н.П., Трыков В.П. Модернизм в зарубежной литературе. М.: Флинта-Наука, 1998. С. 73-97.

Ушакова О.М. Модернизм: о границах понятия // Вестник Пермского университета. Российская и зарубежная филология. 2010. № 6 (12). С.109-114.

Вулф В. Заметки о Д.Г.Лоуренсе // Вулф В. Избранное / пер. с англ. М.: Худож. лит., 1989. С.541-543.

Bakhtin M.M. Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism // Bakhtin M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays / transl. by Vern W. McGee; ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Jolquist. Austen: University of Texas Press, 1986. P. 10-59.

Bell M. D.H.Lawrence and the Meaning of Modernism // Rerhinking Modernism / ed. by Marianne Thormalen. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2003. P. 132-148.

Black M. 'Sons and Lovers'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 124 p.

D.H.Lawrence: 'Sons and Lovers'. Text, Background and Criticism / ed. by Julian Moynahan. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1977. 147 p.

D.H.Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers': A Casebook / ed. by John Worthen and Andrew Harrison. Oxford; New Jersey: Oxford University Press, 2005. 318 p.

Finney B. D.H.Lawrence. 'Sons and Lovers': Penguin Critical Studies. London: Penguin, 1990.121 p.

Forster E.M. Aspects of the Novel // http://ihavebook.org/books/210779/aspects-of-the-novel.html (дата обращения: 27.04.2015).

Harvey Geoffrey. 'Sons and Lovers': The Critics Debate Series. London: Macmillan, 1987. 83 p.

Lawrence D.H. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. London: Heineman, 1936. 567 p.

Lawrence D.H. Sons and Lovers. London: Penguin, 1981.511 p.

Modernism, 1890-1930 / ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 684 p.

Murfin Ross C. 'Sons and Lovers': A Novel of Division and Desire. Twayne Publishers, 1987. 147 p.

Roberts W., Poplawski P. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. 3-ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 800 p.

Shelley Berc. D.H.Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers: Baron's Educational Series. New York: Noodbury, 1985. 122 p.

Twentieth-Century Interpretations of 'Sons and Lovers': A Collection of Critical Essays / ed. by Judith Farr. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1970. iv, 121 p.

«НИЗВЕРЖЕНИЕ» ЛИНЕЙНОГО ВРЕМЕНИ В РОМАНЕ Д.Г. ЛОУРЕНСА «СЫНОВЬЯ И ЛЮБОВНИКИ»

Борис Михайлович Проскурнин

д. филол. н., профессор кафедры мировой литературы и культуры Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет

Статья посвящена вопросам художественного времени в одном из самых известных романов писателя-модерниста Д.Г. Лоуренса. Проблема художественного времени - одна из центральных для писателей-модернистов, ориентировавшихся на художественное воспроизведение рефлексии индивида по поводу своего жизненного опыта, а не на реконструкцию жизни как таковой; они в большей степени были заняты изображением того, какие издержки внутренней жизни возникают, когда индивид проживает определенные внешние событийные обстоятельства, прежде всего - в случае повествования о молодом герое, вступающем в жизнь. Анализируемый в статье роман построен на основе взаимодействия нескольких сюжетных узлов: социопанорамных, биографических (Bildungsroman), автобиографических, психолого-аналитических, каждый из которых по-своему влияет на общую темпоральную структуру романа. В эссе показывается, насколько сложной оказывается она, являя собой синтез семейного, биографического, личностного, исторического, эпического, надперсонального (вечного) времени. Автор доказывает, что Д.Г. Лоуренс, стремясь дать как можно более полную картину внутреннего проживания героем событий его взросления и внешне сохраняя однонаправленность временной координаты сюжета, смешивает традиционную и экспериментаторскую временные парадигмы, замедляя и ускоряя движение времени в зависимости от воспроизводимых внутренних состояний героя.

Ключевые слова: английская литература; Д.Г. Лоуренс; модернизм; реализм; психологизм; художественное время; роман; роман воспитания.

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