Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: mapping modernist continuities
- Part I Early legacies: inheriting modernism at mid century and beyond
- Part II Modernist aesthetics in transition: character, perception, innovation
- Part III Reassessing the ethics of modernist fiction
- Chapter 8 A complex legacy: modernity's uneasy discourse of ethics and responsibility
- Chapter 9 ‘A renewed sense of difficulty’: E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on ethics and form
- Chapter 10 ‘Myths of desire’: D. H. Lawrence, language and ethics in A. S. Byatt's fiction
- Part IV Modernism's global afterlives
- Epilogue Finding the dreadfully real
- Index
- References
Chapter 10 - ‘Myths of desire’: D. H. Lawrence, language and ethics in A. S. Byatt's fiction
from Part III - Reassessing the ethics of modernist fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: mapping modernist continuities
- Part I Early legacies: inheriting modernism at mid century and beyond
- Part II Modernist aesthetics in transition: character, perception, innovation
- Part III Reassessing the ethics of modernist fiction
- Chapter 8 A complex legacy: modernity's uneasy discourse of ethics and responsibility
- Chapter 9 ‘A renewed sense of difficulty’: E. M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith on ethics and form
- Chapter 10 ‘Myths of desire’: D. H. Lawrence, language and ethics in A. S. Byatt's fiction
- Part IV Modernism's global afterlives
- Epilogue Finding the dreadfully real
- Index
- References
Summary
I
In the ‘Introduction’ to the 1991 reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), A. S. Byatt discusses her prolonged engagement with the work and ideas of D. H. Lawrence. Byatt recalls working on the novel during John Holloway's lectures on Lawrence at Cambridge in the mid 1950s. As she began to shape her first book, one of whose central concerns was the struggles of an ambitious woman to enter the world on equal terms with men, she had difficulty in finding usable literary models: ‘there is no female art I can think of that is like what I wanted to do’ (SS, p. x). Byatt acknowledges a number of influences on the final form of the novel, including Proust, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Françoise Sagan and Iris Murdoch. ‘There is also’, she goes on, ‘Lawrence, whom I cannot escape and cannot love’ (p. xii). In terms of class and religious upbringing, Byatt claims, she has much in common with Lawrence, in particular, ‘a terrible desire for something more’ (p. xii) than what was offered by her home and local environment and culture. She describes how she ‘brooded and brooded about how Lawrence cheated with Birkin, who is only explicable if he is Lawrence and a driven artist . . . but who remains a school inspector driven by a need for sexual honesty and personal freedom’ (p. xii). But in spite of accusing Lawrence of cheating with one of his characters Byatt learned a great deal from Lawrence, particularly ‘that you can stop the action of a novel and move it into another dimension’(p. xii). ‘But’, she goes on,
I couldn't love the man who wrote the Plumed Serpent [sic] and I couldn't condone the God of Leavis's creed of wholesomeness and wholeness, partly because I was a woman, and partly because the two didn't in fact coincide, the priest and his creed, the God and his creed. He is violent and savage, as Proust is not, and altogether Proust has more to teach on every page, but is not close to my blood, as Lawrence is. I choose the words advisedly.
(p. xii)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Legacies of ModernismHistoricising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, pp. 187 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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