D.H. Lawrence’s Mr Noon, its Significant Other, and the Physioethics of Reading
p. 83-95
Résumé
The heavy-handed reader-fashioning strategies of Mr Noon make for a notoriously uncongenial read. Yet in its hectoring, uncouth way, steeped in early twentieth-century physiology, the novel implements what Ricœur was later to term ‘appropriation through distance,’ to the point of placing the reader on a quasi-Levinasian ‘plane of superiority.’ A parallel is drawn between its ethics of reading and Levinas’s eros of alterity, notwithstanding the paradox that, in Lawrence’s novel, an eros of alterity presupposes a permanent state of war.
Texte intégral
1D.H. Lawrence’s posthumous, unfinished novel, Mr Noon, was written in two parts, the first in 1920 and the second in 1921 and 1922, at a time when the author was facing particularly adverse reception. Lawrence never got around to rewriting his draft for publication, which would have led him to polish off some of the rough edges and, surely, to tone down some of its more strident passages. As a result, Mr Noon appears to most readers and critics to be a misshapen book lacking artistic cohesion. One never knows what to make of it, so it is usually left unmentioned, on the margin of the Lawrentian corpus. What is more, Mr Noon deliberately ruffles its readers by refusing to fulfil any literary or moral expectation they may have. Here, the author-reader relationship is a conflictual one from the outset. The novel seems to strive to retain its otherness, even at the cost of bad taste and extreme uncongeniality.
2The following passage helps to set the tone and also indicates that the book is intended for the female reader, male critics having proved excessively prudish:
... oh sterner sex, bend your agitated brows away from this page, and suck your dummy of sympathy in peace. Far be it from me to disturb you. I am only too thankful if you’ll keep the indiarubber gag between your quivering, innocent lips. So, darling, don’t look at the nasty book anymore: don’t you then: there, there, don’t cry, my pretty.
No one really takes more trouble soothing and patting his critics on the back than I do. But alas, all my critics are troubled with wind.1
3The least one can say about Mr Noon is that in spite of the fact that it was written in fits and starts over a two-year period, and appears to lack form and consistency, it actually pays great and constant attention to its reader. The implied author takes considerable pains and exercises considerable cunning to chastise or placate or tease the reader and to fashion her in his own image. The book exemplifies a highly complex, ambiguous manipulation strategy, with declared intentions and hidden agendas, which is, arguably, its principal claim to posterity.
4Other critics, though not many, have found further reasons to spend time reading Mr Noon. Thérèse Vichy, in a 1994 article, rightly valued it as a document of the critical moments of Lawrence’s life and of the way in which the writing of autobiography-based fiction and poetry enabled him to make sense of those experiences.2 To put it in terms borrowed from Ricœur, the novel illustrates the dialectic by which Lawrence’s self-perceived character at that point in his life and his self-constancy are mediated by his narrative identity, thus producing a dynamic personal identity to live by.
... narrative identity stands between the two; in narrativizing character, the narrative returns to it the movement abolished in acquired dispositions, in the sediment of identifications-with.... Narrative identity makes the two ends of the chain link up with one another: the permanence in time of character and that of self-constancy.3
5That writing this book was an identity-building process for Lawrence is undoubtedly true. He had been facing adversity from all sides, and had been traumatisingly challenged on grounds of class, of education, of morals, both by the Weekley and by the von Richthofen families. But in writing this novel, Lawrence was not only building his own ‘identity to live by’: as I suggested earlier, he was also trying to build ours, the readers.’ All books do that, of course: the passage from Oneself as Another quoted above not only describes the writing but also the reading experience. The difference is that in the case of Mr Noon, it constitutes the primary and explicit object of the reading contract: you who read this, be prepared to be transformed permanently—in Ricœur’s terms, be prepared to be challenged in your ‘acquired dispositions,’ in your ‘sediment of identifications-with’: be prepared to be dispossessed, thrown off balance, and compelled to achieve a new adjustment, an incrementally improved self. The pragmatic reader-fashioning strategies of this novel are worth studying in their own right, as are some of the elements of Lawrentian physiological metaphor upon which this endeavour rests, and which will be the object of the second part of this article.
6Of particular interest is the fact that whereas, according to Ricœur, the process of ‘returning to character the movement abolished in acquired dispositions’normally finds temporary stasis, in Mr Noon, it is an open-ended, even endless process. In Time and Narrative, through the concept of catharsis, Ricœur articulates the possibility of moments of fulfilment and peace as the horizons of expectation of the text and of the reader temporarily become identical.4 Here, there can be no such convergence, because no new horizons of expectation are ever allowed to materialise, and the old ones are systematically deflated. So that the ‘cases’ submitted to the reader’s scrutiny are never closed, and one must suspend interpretation indefinitely. The central character, whose basic makeup includes elements of Lawrence’s life and acquaintances, is provided with a narrative identity which never resolves into an even temporarily stable sense of self. Instead, Gilbert Noon changes radically and unaccountably in the ellipsis between the two parts. Not only does he change girlfriends and scenery, but he also loses basic character features, such as his reportedly diabolical impulse to do mischief and his fondness for mathematics. Ultimately, true to his name, he wavers between different identities, often described as ‘not being himself’ (MN 144). In the second part of the novel, he remains the permanently surprised and wide-eyed explorer, and his aristocratic Johanna, Lawrence’s ficted5 Frieda von Richthofen, remains forever the desirable stranger. This impression of open-endedness is of course strengthened by the fact that the narrative is unfinished, and interrupted in mid-sentence; but it is also, undoubtedly, a deliberate artist’s statement. If the narrative is a means to come to terms with ghosts, to weave them into one’s personal history, Lawrence deliberately chooses to have them persist as ghosts, as the ultimately irreducible ‘problems’ which keep everyone on their toes, character, implied author, and reader alike.
1 Mr Noon as speculum lectorum
7The irreducible problem which most haunted Lawrence as he was drafting Mr Noon, however, was his reader. He had to sell his books while thinking that the tastes of the greater number were all wrong and that the critics were trying to ruin his career. This high-pressure situation accounts for the stridency and, at times, viciousness of his addresses to the reader. The Rainbow had been suppressed by court order in 1915; now Women in Love was under continual bowdlerising attacks on the part of its potential publishers, and finally, two unfavourable reviews of The Lost Girl came in just as Lawrence was writing the second part of Mr Noon.6 Because of the uproar caused by some of the more explicit or so-called vulgar passages of the previous novels, Lawrence’s publishers were increasingly unwilling to take risks, and Lawrence was begged to tone down and ‘button up’ his writing—a move which must have told on his inspiration, and which accounts for some of the anti-bourgeois satire of the book. Mr Noon, whose first part appeared three years after the author’s death and which was only published as a whole in 1984, is a product of and a creative response to those pressures, a fact that Lydia Blanchard rightly took into consideration in her article on the narrator-reader conflict and the ‘furious comedy’of this novel.7 The present paper is very much indebted to her analysis of the way Mr Noon builds or tries to build its own audience and tries to make the reader shift her expectations and change her reading protocols. My argument would be that the reader resists this educational enterprise, and that she is supposed to resist, she is meant to remain the irreducible Other haunting the narrative and never being woven into it, unlike the ‘gentle reader’ of yore who was (apparently) harmoniously woven into the narrative of Tom Jones or the Preface of Joseph Andrews. To use a facile analogy, encouraged by the novel’s title, the reader is the great lumpish vacuum in the middle of the palindromic title-word ‘Noon.’
8Note that this lumpish vacuum in the title-word is not a single but a double one, as in ‘double o’: a duplicate void. The readers and their expectations have become a mystery: do they want to be shocked and stirred out of their complacency, which seemed to have been one of the strengths of Lawrence’s first novels, or do they want to be given only the perfectly acceptable? More than ever, the reader seems utterly out of reach, not to mention the male reader, by default hopelessly hostile. Therefore, as if to fill up this vacuum, the narrative produces a substitute female reader-figure, called ‘gentle reader’ in mock-Sternian fashion, on whom can be piled up all the shortcomings of the vast group of supposedly unworthy readers. This ficted reader, this caricature of a reader, is then placed on a stage, or rather on a wrestling arena, and left to face an implied author8 who is given all liberty to debunk the all-pervasive dominant discourse of taste, goodwill and social reform which she embodies.
9The ficted reader’s position in the narrative space is that of a witness, that of a Greek chorus perhaps, a bearer of the doxa, the wisdom of the ages. This would be a privileged position if the implied author was not systematically robbing her of her say. As the creator of this caricature of a reader, it is, of course, his own privilege to put the words into her mouth. The overall result is a sarcastic parody of readerly judgment, whose major flaws, we are given to understand, are lyricism, idealism, class prejudice, and a self-righteous tendency to intrude in the most intimate aspects of everyone’s life. Here is a specific example, an early passage probably written as an attempt to ward off any accusation of indecency, since the novel starts off with several erotic pages on ‘the spoon’ (spooning being after-church courtship, moments of sensual intimacy shared by youngsters away from their families’supervision):
Since the spoon is one of the essential mysteries of modern love, particularly English modern love, let us clasp our hands before its grail-like effulgence. For although all readers belonging to the upper classes; and what reader doesn’t belong to the upper classes; will deny any acquaintance with any spoon but the metallic object, we regret to have to implicate the whole of the English race, from princes downwards, in the mystic business.
Dear reader, have we not left off believing in positive evil? And therefore is it not true that the seducer, invaluable to fiction, is dead? The seducer and the innocent maid are no more. We live in better days.
... There is nothing wrong in it. We are all so perfectly sweet about it all, and on such a sympathetic plane.
... you will be obliged to me, I am sure, if I pull down that weary old scarecrow of a dark designing seducer, and the alpaca bogey of lust. There is no harm in us any more, is there now? Our ways are so improved: so spiritualized, really. What harm is there in a bit of spoon? (MN 20)
... Ah, we are all so clean, nowadays: fine clean young men, infinitely spoony, and clean young maidens to match. Nothing earthy, not we. All in mid-air, our goings on. (MN 23)
10Here the implied author is pre-empting all interpretation of the scene taking place under the reader’s eyes. The reader is imagined to be saying: why be so prosaic about such romantic heights as the mutually consented kiss? And why desecrate with intimations of evil such a wonderful and socially controlled moment as after-church courtship? In the process, those objections are anticipated and, as it were, defused; no room is left for alternative readings of the scene, which undoubtedly contains an element of coercion and violence. If one were to apply to the author-reader relationship the ethics of interpersonal relationships put forward by Levinas’s classic Totality and Infinity, this would be purely destructive, since it would amount to forcefully incorporating ‘the other’into ‘the same,’ as in tyranny,9 thereby destroying the other, the only guarantee of our humanity. By producing a distorted, satirical image of the reader—bourgeois and full of class prejudice, prudish, hypocritical and rather voyeuristic— the narrative seems to be doing exactly that: destroying its other, the only guarantee of its legibility. However, in fact, the use of this makeshift ficted reader rather draws one’s attention to the inaccessibility of the real reader (that is, the flesh-and-blood person who may or may not pick up the book one day). What is more, by staging this preposterously prejudiced and deluded reader, the narrative presupposes a very open-minded kind of real reader: a reader who, like Emmie, the young girl who allows herself to be fondled by Mr Noon, is a good sport.
11Behind all the hectoring and bullying, the reader is in fact called upon to build a mutual enemy: the doxa, the discourse of morals, reform and charity. The ficted reader acts as a screen, in both senses of the word: a paper experiment through which one may observe typical readerly shortcomings, and a protective shield. Splitting the reader into unknowable real reader and ficted reader is a device which, far from being a declaration of defiance (as critics so far would have it), actually grants the former full confidence and integrity. The discourse of opinion and morals is placed in the mouth of the ficted reader, who is standing there like a self-righteous voyeur, so that the real reader is allowed to remain outside the arena, on a plane of superiority.10 He or she remains the book’s Other: a desire-inspiring and awe-inspiring transcendence.
12Conversely, this also means that we are never really allowed into the narrative, we can never appropriate it or even relate to the world and characters it stages. The novel is peppered with instances of this deliberate maintaining of the hermeneutic gap, among which a scene where, quite literally, a door is closed in our faces to keep us from enjoying the details of Gilbert and Johanna’s carnal exploits. How then is this book still a reading experience, rather than an example of non-communication? Paradoxically, our being left out does not mean that we are left unchanged. The old mirror effect seems to work, even at nearly a century’s distance, as one strives to understand the exact nature of the hermeneutic sins committed by the ficted reader and the characters; but, what is more, we are initiated into the value of not understanding, a posture of withdrawal which was to become central in Lawrence’s later novels.
2 Preventing Bubble Formation
13In the second volume of his Essays in Hermeneutics (1986), Paul Ricœur had epoch-marking pages on the centrality of ‘not understanding’in hermeneutics. There, the subject’s purpose is the appropriation of the text; yet the way to reach this, as it were, is by letting go. ‘... appropriation is quite the contrary of contemporaneousness and congeniality: it is understanding at and through distance.’11 Mr Noon is all about this necessary distance: not only because its unfinished and sketchy qualities make it difficult to relate to any of the characters, but mostly because this is, first and foremost, a self-reflexive narrative, a narrative ironically reflecting upon itself. It is a narrative with a split perspective, or, to make free use of Levinasian terminology, it is articulated around a necessary chasm between the same and the other (bear in mind the mirror-structure of the title-word, with a twofold void in its middle). Now, Lawrence, in those days, would have gone to great lengths to preserve that irony, that sacred space between story and implied author, between narrative and reader. Even if (or because) a ficted reader is included in the cast and given a marginal influence in the unfolding of the plot, the real reader is deliberately kept at a distance, not so much as a sign of flawed writing as for philosophical and ideological reasons.
14In the intertext of Lawrence’s writing of the post-war years, with its Nietzschean diatribes against charity, against compassion, and—on a macrocosmic scale—against diplomatic interference, ‘congeniality,’ to use the translation chosen by Ricœur’s translators in the sentence quoted earlier, was a fallacy. From essays such as ‘Democracy’ (1919), ‘Whitman’ (1923), ‘Education of the People,’ and a novel like Aaron’s Rod (1922), it is clear that Lawrence’s diagnosis for the ills of civilisation is that it suffers from an excess of universal identification, also termed ‘love’ or ‘sympathy.’ One symptom of this is the Wilsonian ‘world-brotherhood’ under which, according to Lawrence, lies the basest materialism. Another symptom is the social reformist movement, which threatens to transfer control of the most private aspects of life, such as sex and reproduction (MN 20), to the State.12 This view is most clearly put in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).
15According to this essay, the psyche is structured around the ‘sympathetic’ and ‘voluntary’ poles of the body; now, we are suffering from imbalance in favour of the former, which is turning us all into amorphous nonentities—slaves, one is tempted to say after Nietzsche, although Lawrence has ‘lambs.’13 This has given rise to a phenomenon of ego-negating universality, and to people and nations interfering with one another’s privacies and fates. At the level of the individual, this disorder is associated with the problem of lifelong mother-child dependency, well-known to readers of Lawrence, from Sons and Lovers to Fantasia of the Unconscious, as a central issue in his early philosophy; at the macrocosmic level, it takes the form of the surrendering of national autonomy. Page after page of his 1919-1923 texts, most of which, predictably, did not go down very well with the reading public, show charitable ‘identification-with’ (Ricœur [1990] 1992, 165) to be at once promiscuous and hypocritical.
16The dummy-sucking critic, the ‘critic troubled with wind’ of the first half of Mr Noon, epitomises all the excesses of universal love, charitable feelings, and meddlesomeness. We are invited to join in the satirical fun and deride this baby-like figure, and yet this also serves as a mirror held up to the reader, as if to warn us against our own impulse to identify, to revel in a feeling of intimacy with the characters, or in a temporary fusion of horizons of expectation. Such a fusion would be interfering with the narrative, very much in the way that Emmie’s benevolent friends and relatives, at the end of Part I, instead of leaving her abused body alone, create the thing—the putative baby, or the imagined pathology—that keeps them interested in her and ties her down safely to her sick-bed. That too, like the bubble of sympathy that troubles the civic-minded critic, proves to be a mere wind, a mere nothing keeping misreaders from seeing the true otherness of the text. Instead, like the bubble-like critic or the benevolent crowd projecting their own agenda onto the belly of the jeune fille, we keep to our comfort zone.14
17Much of Mr Noon is about the dangers of bubble-formation. The fun of the novel lies in its more Swiftian moments, as when, for example, the charitable spiritual man, inflated—like Swift’s Æolists in A Tale of a Tub—with the wind of Uplift, is seen soaring above the heads of his more mundane contemporaries:
Let us invoke the great spirit of Uplift. Oh Uplift, Uplift, that which carries us beyond ourselves, how much bigger we are than ever we were intended to be when we whirl with thy wind in our skirts, heavenwards. Oh mighty rushing wind, oh universal Uplift, carry us above our own high-water-mark and make us boundless.... Oh holy uplift, let us look down on our fellow-men: in love of course! (MN 156–157)
18In the process, the charitable man turns into a self-complacent bubble ready to burst at the slightest provocation:
In fact I should warn people to beware of entertaining charitable and benevolent feelings just now, till they are quite sure their material gas-envelope is quite sound. Let them rub and feel their trouser-seat and their backside carefully, to make sure it is a sound vacuum, and that it will act as trustworthy float when it is filled with the spirit of uplift, most vacuous of all vacuosities. I say the trouser-seat, because of course that is the obvious pouch or inflatus-bladder of Uplift. Ah humanity, humanity, let your posterior forever not exist, save as a vacuum. Queens of Spain have no legs, but all lofty mankind has no backside: not a bit of it. Nothing there. Nothing twin-protuberant and kickable. Only the float-void. (MN 156–157)
19But the theory never lies very far behind the joke. Aaron’s Rod, for example, which was written in the same period as Mr Noon, includes a well-known, quite serious scene where Lilly massages Aaron’s lower body, in what seems to be an attempt either to free him of trapped wind or to stimulate his lower ‘voluntary’ centres. Whether the stimulation takes the form of a ‘patting on the back’ (MN 141–142) or a kick in the backside, it is still a therapeutic method, destined to prevent the formation of self-complacent bubbles. The lower body massage, the well-aimed kick, or the spank15 are fundamental gestures in Lawrence’s physiology, as is indicated in the following passage (widely read at the time, because it featured prominently in the well-advertised opening number of The Adelphi) from Fantasia of the Unconscious:
And if the child is old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom soundly spanked—by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that most necessary duty. For a child’s bottom is made occasionally to be spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker transfers his wrath to the great will-centres in the child, and these will-centres react intensely, are vivified and educated.16
20The upbraiding and hectoring in Mr Noon, the insults to the reader— the ‘sniffing mongrel bitch of a reader,’ the ‘girning, snarl-voiced hell-bird of a detestable reader’ (MN 205) are the book’s equivalent of a sound spanking. They are meant to stimulate our mental voluntary centres, making us fit for rebellion and self-sovereignty. This sounds oddly mechanistic, and it is a surprising revelation of the comparatively negligible role of ‘inner lights’in this allegedly post-romantic author’s writing. Yet to anyone aware of Lawrence’s emphasis on the anteriority of the body (that which is subject to internal and external stimulation) over the soul, best exemplified in Fantasia of the Unconscious, and on the morals of the material body rather than the mind, it is not at all surprising. This is typical Lawrentian physiological ethics, at work here to make us fitter readers.
21Interestingly, half a century later, Ricœur allowed a similar though residual vein of behaviourist-like psychology to filter through his discussion of the ‘aesthetic’ theory of reading (that of Jauss). In the following passage, reading is about stimulation and response—about educating the body. After all, the word ‘aesthetics,’ originally, refers to sensuous perception; although Ricœur views this process of opening up the reader’s expectations and reconfiguring the reading self as an intellectual one, one could argue that his choice of words in his description of reading is not entirely at odds with Lawrence’s mechanicist physiology of stimulation and adaptative response. Ricœur sees reading as a ‘truly vital experience’ (though his French has vive, which could equally translate as ‘live’) because of the ‘strategy of illusion-breaking that illusion-making requires as its antidote. This strategy is one of those more apt to stimulate an active reading, a reading that permits us to say that something is happening’ (Ricœur 1988, 169–170). Potentially, then, Lawrence’s call for a degree of well-intentioned violence and his book-mediated version of it is an extreme form of Ricœur’s later, tamer stimulation-and-response approach to reading (the lines just quoted being part of a larger discussion of reader-response theory). To be sure, behaviourism was much more in fashion in Lawrence’s day than in the 1980s, though even then it was the object of much heated controversy. But the stimulation strategy metaphor is a telling one, one that suggests that reconfiguring the reading self affects mind and body alike in very intimate, unconscious ways. It is a deliberate educational strategy, but one that mimics the spontaneous processes of life.
22Characteristically, Lawrence puts it in terms of obstetrics, of labour. The implied author’s claim that becoming experienced is like ‘cracking the womb’ applies to his reader as much as to his Gilbert Noon (incidentally, it also belatedly reveals that the implied author’s deliberate decision to turn his back on the male reader was only a desperate plea for attention couched in deprecation):
... do not imagine, ungentle reader, that by just chasing women you will ever get anywhere. Gilbert might have had a thousand Emmies, and even a thousand really nice women, and yet never have cracked the womb. It needed the incalculable fight such as he fought, unconscious and willy-nilly, with his German Johanna: and such as I fight with you, oh gentle but rather cowardly and imbecile reader: for such, really, I find you.
(MN 291–292)
23Ricœur too has passages that suggest that the reading experience is a kind of rebirth. Elaborating upon Booth’s claim that the author creates his readers, he suggests that, if it is true that a new kind of reader is brought forth by a truly challenging reading experience, the said reader is not passive but soon made active in the process of his/her coming into autonomous being:
... it may be the function of most corrosive literature to contribute to making a new kind of reader appear, a reader who is himself suspicious, because reading ceases to be a trusting voyage made in the company of a reliable narrator, becoming instead a struggle with the implied author, a struggle leading the reader back to himself. (Ricœur 1988, 164)
24Clearly, to read Mr Noon is to embark on exactly this sort of voyage. The relationship with the other, which Levinas famously described as an eros, can be an agon; though in Lawrence’s view, in the years following the war, the agon was not just a ‘struggle,’ a dialectical tension between appropriation and distance, as Ricœur meant it in his theory of fiction reading, but a blood fight. The birth process, we are informed, is a ‘bloody and horrid and gruesome affair’ (MN 291) of which the reader should be the aggressive agent, not the object. This is the barbaric rationale behind the torrent of abuse thrown in the reader’s face, the ‘rampageous reader, ferocious reader, surly, rabid reader, hell-cat of a reader, a tartar, a termagant, a tanger’ (MN 204–205): those are not meant as insults but, it turns out, as fatherly encouragement to ‘crack the womb.’ The resulting impression is that the framing narratorial rhetoric is almost mechanically—and rather hair-raisingly—designed like a womb in labour, once nurturing but now downright hostile to its host, with recurrent cramps—incidentally, the word used by Emmie herself to describe her stomach pains—meant to hasten the delivery of the reader. This pattern of delivering oneself from the old matrix (MN 292) is no novelty in Lawrence’s philosophy, of course— one recalls, for instance, the ending of his first successful novel, Sons and Lovers, where Paul finally and painfully breaks the last teguments that kept him tied to his mother’s world. Previously, in Lawrence’s 1911 novel The White Peacock, one of the main characters was described as an ‘unlicked cub,’ thereby suggesting that he was unfit for marriage; closer to the time when Mr Noon was written, the birth-giving metaphor was central in the essay ‘The Crown,’ in very much the same terms as in Mr Noon.
25Ultimately, on thematic, metaphorical, pragmatic levels, Mr Noon is a novel about aborted maieutics. Just as Emmie is not delivered of the thing inside her, Gilbert Noon is not delivered of the ‘black devils’ of which he is possessed (MN 27), unlike Aaron’s Rod’s eponymous hero thanks to the tender care of his mentor/midwife Rawdon Lilly; after meeting his mate and match, Noon is only given a glimpse of what his reborn self might be like, but never achieves it. Because that is not where the moral of the story lies. From this novel designed like a womb in travail, ridden with cracks and pangs, we are delivered only to continue the blood fight with the Other; in fact, we are left to understand that this is a permanent condition. This is the message behind the parable of the less-than-idyllic love story, and the justification behind the narrative’s pragmatic as well as thematic centre-staging of conflict. ‘War,’ in this context, is code for ‘preserved alterity.’ It is a principle whereby the tension between the same and the other is maintained at all costs, and the communication is kept alive in spite of the reader’s impulse to appropriate the narrative, and in spite of the implied author’s impulse to control the reception of his narrative. The enemy here is passionately feared, desired and needed.
26Undoubtedly, Mr Noon is an uncongenial book. In fact, all of Lawrence’s writing of the post-war years went against the grain of the 1920s Zeitgeist: most notably, his critique of Wilsonian universality and charity led him, in order to maintain artistic coherence, to glorify war. We know that war is a structuring motif in Women in Love; but there, it remained implicit, and it took the 1919 foreword on ‘the bitterness of the war’ to make the reader of Women in Love realise what a decisive event it had been for Lawrence. In Mr Noon however, a direct allusion is made to the recent world war, and homage is paid to the Germans for having acted upon their bellicose impulse (MN 291). We can only assume that this line would have been removed had Lawrence decided to proceed with the publication. Yet by resorting to this rather heavy-handed provocation, he was merely trying to give more impact to his theoretical emphasis on maintaining the chasm between ‘the same’ and ‘the other,’ the same dichotomy as that on which Levinas later based his ethics. Of course those were two very different writers, one a reader of Nietzsche, and a novelist writing in the aftermath of the First World War of which he could hardly call himself a victim, the other a religious philosopher and a direct victim of the most murderous conflict ever; but one cannot help wondering at the fact that where Lawrence had seen the promise of something like pure egoism (in the then fashionable Stirnerian parlance) and endless Dionysian energy, Levinas saw the potential basis of universal, Utopian charity. Both were all about love, but what they meant by love was diametrically opposed.
Notes de bas de page
1 D.H. Lawrence, Mr Noon (first part 1934), ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: CUP, 1984) 141–142. Henceforth parenthetically cited as MN.
2 Thérèse Vichy, ‘Autobiography, Poetry and Fiction in Look! We Have Come Through! and Mr Noon,’ Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 39 (April 1994): 101–112.
3 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (1990; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) 165–166.
4 Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative vol. III: Narrated Time, transl. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (1985; Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1988) 178.
5 This term was used to describe Lawrence’s life-inspired characters by Karl Ingersoll, who attributed it to Norman Holland (‘Postmodern Psychoanalysis,’ Innovation/Renovation, ed. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan [Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983] 304– 305). It is used here to describe the reader, of whom the author knows nothing apart from some (unsympathetic) responses to his current writing, and who is ‘ficted’ as Mr Noon’s disapproving ‘gentle reader.’
6 Lydia Blanchard, ‘D.H. Lawrence and His “Gentle Reader”: The Furious Comedy of Mr Noon,’ Lawrence and Comedy, eds. Paul Eggert and John Worthen (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) 89–108, 98.
7 ’This attack on the reader... must have been focused very precisely at the start of the writing of Part II of the novel by the various problems brought about by the publication of The Lost Girl and the imminent publication, in England, of Women in Love’ (Blanchard 98).
8 A term coined by Wayne Booth and used by Ricœur in Time and Narrative: ‘the only type of author whose authority is in question here is not the real author, the object of biography, but the implied author. It is the implied author who takes the initiative in the show of strength underlying the relation between writing and reading’ (Ricœur 1988, 160). Tradition having sanctioned the use of the category, it will not be challenged here; but it is to be noted that Ricœur’s French has auteur impliqué, which suggests an ‘involved’ rather than ‘implied’ author.
9 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority (1961; Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) 47.
10 In Levinas’s words; alternatively, a ‘dimension of height’ (Levinas 86).
11 Paul Ricœur, From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics vol. II, transl. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991) 87.
12 An allusion to The State Endowment of Motherhood, by Dr. David Eder, is made by one of the secondary characters in the first part of Mr Noon, to Gilbert Noon’s great disgust, and is the apparent immediate cause of his departure from Britain.
13 In his essay ‘Apocalypse’ (1929).
14 ‘A third dialectic takes shape on the horizon of this search for coherence. If it is too successful, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and readers, feeling themselves to be on an equal footing with the work, come to believe in it so completely they lose themselves in it’ (Ricœur 1988, 169).
15 A passage from ‘Whitman,’ excluded from periodical publication but included in posthumous editions of the essay, adds sodomy to this list of stimulative therapies.
16 From ‘Trees, Babies, Papas, and Mamas,’ The Adelphi I. 1 (1923): 28. First printed in the USA as part of Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 91.
Auteur
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Noëlle Cuny
University of Mulhouse — Haute Alsace
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À la rencontre de la différence
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