Psychic Interfusion and the Health of the Novel

According to D. H. Lawrence, the novel was in poor health in the 1920s, its sickness attributable to what he sees as its failure to recognise and value the psychic connections between people. In his view, the novel is complicit in entrenching a misapprehension that human experience is necessarily individuated. Offering the work of James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Dorothy Richardson as exemplars of an overly narrow self-consciousness (‘Future’ 151), Lawrence contends that many novels of his time provide ‘something awfully lifelike’, but ‘as lifeless as most people are’ (‘The Novel’ 182). However accomplished he finds the prose of his peers, Lawrence identifies their wordiness as detached from worldliness, complaining that ‘you can get a James Joyce or a Marcel Proust to say as many words as they like – and they like to say a legion – yet they never say anything except the innumerable last words about their own specific case’ (‘Morality’, first version 242). The failure Lawrence attributes to his contemporaries is reflected in the ‘crustacean’ novelist Clifford Chatterley of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), who, insulated in himself by his ‘hard, efficient shell’ (110), writes stories which similarly enclose their characters. Clifford's novels, popular with both readers and critics, are ‘curiously true to modern life’, yet there is ‘no touch, no actual contact’ in them (16), filled as they are with ‘that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end’ (50). For Lawrence, the problem stems from viewing consciousnesses as discrete. In his view, ‘the basic state of consciousness which preserves the human being all his life fresh and alive’ is that of being in a ‘living continuum with all the universe’ (‘Galsworthy’ fragment 249, emphasis from source). Rejecting the discrete personality, Lawrence's project as a writer centres upon reconfiguring how literature approaches character and development.

What Lawrence calls for is, in effect, the novel of psychic connection. Demanding novels which render character as developing unpredictably, in interconnection with other consciousnesses, human and otherwise, Lawrence requests the kind of challenge to established novelistic form which was to emerge across the twentieth century.