D. H. Lawrence’s Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective by Ben Stoltzfus (review)

Reviewed by: D. H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective by Ben Stoltzfus Andrew Harrison Ben Stoltzfus. D. H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective. Lexington Books, 2022. xiii + 170 pp. This book addresses seven short stories and novellas written by D. H. Lawrence in the final six years of his life (between 1924 and 1930). It was a period when Lawrence offered his most urgent critique of modernity in the nonfiction works Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, Sketches of Etruscan Places, and Apocalypse, in the many articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines, and in essays such as "Introduction to These Paintings," Pornography and Obscenity, and A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Ben Stoltzfus discusses Lawrence's forthright views in the Introduction. Lawrence was "describing people's alienation from themselves, each other, and society while also contrasting this estrangement with the more harmonious relationship with people and the cosmos that was cultivated by earlier Chaldean, Greek, and Etruscan cultures" (1). Stoltzfus believes that the holistic ambition of Lawrence's writing (its concern with wholeness of being) has a lot to offer our own era of climate change, accelerated digital technologies, social media, terrorism, conspiracy theories, and global conflict. Lacan suggests that the unconscious is structured like a language and revealed to the reader through tropes. By uncovering the unconscious in Lawrence's stories and assessing its relation to (or noncorrespondence with) the conscious level of narration, the reader arrives at new kinds of End Page 177 self-awareness, bringing "the unconscious It" (17) and "the I (ego)" together in a manner that pushes back against the self-alienation of modernity. In this way, Lawrence's stories are said to provide "a recipe for survival in a dysfunctional age" (23). The first chapter, on Sun, invokes Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg" (29) method of writing, whereby one-eighth of a text's meaning is contained in the narration and the other seven-eighths must be deduced by the reader. In Lawrence's case, the seven-eighths comprises a subliminal sense of the "ideology" expressed in his "philosophical essays." Sun is "a simple fable-like tale" (33) of an ailing protagonist, Juliet, who on her doctor's orders leaves her middle-aged businessman-husband in New York and goes with their young son to Sicily to recuperate. Juliet "originally exemplifies the human damage that the urban, mechanized modern world causes to people," but under the influence of the sun she is gradually healed. Stoltzfus argues that the story is informed by "Lawrence's entire belief in accepting the cosmos as the 'ancients' did" (34) and "the importance of sexuality in tune with the elements (the penetrating sun) and the possibility of sensual fulfilment." Chapters 2 (on "The Woman Who Rode Away") and 3 (on "None of That!") take a similar approach. In "The Woman Who Rode Away," Lawrence traces the eponymous heroine's rejection of her businessman-husband and quest for adventure as she travels on horseback into the mountains surrounding their ranch in central Mexico. She encounters Chilchui Indians whom she willingly joins, but they take her captive, drugging her and offering her up as a sacrifice to their gods at the winter solstice. The woman's "immolation" (49) represents "a symbolic redemption of mankind": "a much needed realignment of the cosmic imbalance that prompted her departure from home in the first place." "None of That!" is compared to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Both are tales of women who are deeply drawn to bullfighters. Whereas the unrepressed Brett Ashley in Hemingway's novel seduces Pedro Romero but refuses to accede to his wishes and become a conventional Spanish wife, Ethel Cane in Lawrence's tale represses her desire for the Mexican Cuesta and attempts to control and manipulate him. When she loses their battle of wills and visits his house, Cuesta gives her up to his friends, who rape her. She undergoes a nervous collapse and poisons herself. The story stages "a battle royal sic of the sexes, a life and death struggle between Cuesta, the body and Ethel, the mind" (65): had Ethel "listened to the voice of her 'blood-consciousness,' and worked...