James Joyce

Matthew Arnold, as we have seen, was a keen critic of the Philistine, a term which he used to denote the ignorant and unenlightened middle classes. Joyce, too, was from an early age a rebel against the Philistinism of his native Dublin.

By the turn of the twentieth century, he had begun to reject his Catholic upbringing and remained uninvolved in the political activities of his day. He was already coming to see himself as an exile and a writer, ideas which, as your text suggests, for Joyce were closely related: "To preserve his integrity, to avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and above all to be able to recreate with both total understanding and total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had to go abroad" (Norton 2231).

After 1904, Joyce lived abroad, and it was from abroad that he wrote his famed Dublin-based works: The Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan's Wake (1939).

To get a fuller understanding of Joyce and his career, read the introductory section in your text (2231-35).

D. H. Lawrence

"It was Lawrence chiefly who brought back poetical vision to the novel, who freed it from drab commonplace realism and the self-conscious word-spinning of the 'stylists.'"
      --R. Aldington

In The English Novel, Walter Allen describes Lawrence as "a great romantic poet who used the form of the novel . . . to express his criticism of modern civilization and his vision of the good life" (New York: Dutton: 1954, 431). However, at times his loathing of the Philistine, his "nonconformist attitude, combined with rancorous class feeling, does give rise to a nagging, intolerable tone of moral superiority" (432).

In contrast to Joyce, Lawrence was an anti-intellectual. His was an elemental vision of the mystery of life, a life not known but felt. For him, this "mystery was not to be apprehended or explained in terms of reason and logic--that was the way to kill it. It could be experienced only by direct intuition, transmitted by touch" (Allen 435).

Kenneth Young points out how Lawrence was aware that "[n]on-human nature lives to the full and in complete naturalness; man does not. . . . Wholeness is holiness to Lawrence; and it is a pathetic yearning for an innocence the world has lost for ever, if indeed it ever existed" (D. H. Lawrence, London: Longman, 1952, 12; emphasis mine). In following, he underscores another central concern for Lawrence:

Lawrence taught that a man's first duty was to his deepest self . . . that a man, or society, that cuts off from the elemental, animal bases, the earth, the sun, true sexual communion, is doomed. Man may achieve extraordinary glories in science and speculation, society attain the finest and subtlest veneer of civilization, but unless the animal roots are maintained and cultivated, neurosis will appear in the one, violent explosions of war or epidemic in the other. (40)

Lawrence's emphasis upon feeling rather than intellect lies at the heart of his characterization. Douglas Hewitt, in English Fiction 1890-1940 (London: Longman, 1988), underscores Lawrence's "astonishing ability . . . to involve us in the warring contradictions in the minds of his characters" and suggests that as we experience their "spontaneous shifts of feeling" we get the sense that the writer, "like the reader, is exploring them" (178).

Walter Allen also alludes to this feature, speaking of

the sheer urgency of his writing; the words seem hot and quivering on the page. . . . [H]e takes us right inside his characters; we apprehehnd them instantaneously through the force of his intuition. He captures, it seems, the moment of life itself, both in men and women and in the physical world of nature. There is a delighted, immediate, nonintellectual response to everything alive. (433)

After reading the introduction in your text (2313), look at the stories in terms of the ideas presented above. Note especially the "warring contradictions" in the central characters.

For an excellent online biography of D. H. Lawrence, click here.

^© Scott Foll 2000. All rights reserved.