Human relations in the works of d. H. Lawrence

CHAPTER 1 . GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CREATIVITY OF D. H. LAWRENCE
1.1 Early 20th century England: literary context

The study of the literary situation in England at the beginning of the 20th century was carried out by such domestic critics and literary scholars as G.V. Anikin, D.G. Zhantieva , N.Yu. Zatonsky , V.V. Ivasheva, N.P. Michalska and others.

As for foreign critics and literary scholars, in this case, W. Alain, A. Kettle , F. Leavis , M. Marie, A. Niven and others should be mentioned. At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the English literary process is characterized by the complexity of development, reflecting the aggravation of social and class contradictions.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, significant changes took place in English literature, due to the deepest and largest historical shifts (the First World War, the Great October Socialist Revolution). In contact with new historical forces, the content of literature was also updated: new spheres of reality opened up, new dramatic collisions arose. An intensive process of searching and discovering new genre and style forms began.
Mankind entered the age of social and scientific and technological revolutions, a new world, a new man, a new consciousness was born in blood and torment. The old world disintegrated, collapsed, burying in its ruins the old beliefs, ideals, canons. Common to all writers of the early twentieth century was the rejection of bourgeois modernity, its perception as chaos, the feeling of decay as a characteristic feature of the era [ 1, 10-11].
A few years before the First World War in English literature, one by one, various trends began to appear, decadent in their basis. The first step of the writers of these years towards decadence was the movement of the Imagists , which arose even before the war [2, 24].
Imagism arose as a trend in 1908 in England, in the bowels of the London Poets' Club. The fossilization of familiar poetic forms forced young writers to look for new ways in poetry. The first Imagists were Thomas Ernest Hume and Francis Flint. The Imagist group included Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound , D.G. Lawrence, Harold Monroe, Amy Lowell, D.G. Fletcher , Marianne Moore , May Sinclair and Ford Madox Ford.
The second group of Imagists gathered around Ezra Pound . In October 1912, Ezra Pound received from the young American poet Hilda Doolittle , who moved to England a year ago, a selection of her poems that struck him with " Imagist conciseness." Hilda Doolittle attracted the English novelist Richard Aldington to the group. A sign of the second stage of Imagism was the appeal to antiquity, and its result was the poetic anthology “ Des Imagistes " (1915), after which Pound left the group and went to France. The war began, and the center of Imagism began to move from warring England to America.
Famous novelists David Herbert Lawrence, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford spoke with poems in Imagist anthologies , there are also poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot, as well as two other future pillars of American poetry - Carl Sandburg and the very young William Carlos Williams [3, 53] .
The goal of Imagism is an "accurate image" based on objectivity and concreteness. The subject matter was declared "neutral" and non-essential. She had to retreat before "pure" imagery, interpreted as the "objective task of verse." Behind this declaration was a challenge to the romantic aesthetic, and more than that, to the humanistic conception of man on which the romantic vision was based.
Imagism rejected the view of poetry as an uncontrolled "lyrical" eruption, shook up the junk of countless epigone ballads and meditations, the authors of which prayed to Tennyson. He returned the severity of form to poetry. When the Imagists decided to release lyrical experience from strict control, their poetry sometimes acquired both richness and depth [4, 75].
The Imagists talked a lot about the ugliness and unreliability of the bourgeois world around them, about the dominance of the philistines and merchants who were unable to understand the beautiful. But the condemnation of the world by the Imagists was purely aesthetic. They created an involved cult of a beautiful image, and more often they turned purely to book images (usually to the tradition of ancient Greek poetry and mythology), and not to life.
The First World War contributed to the development of the "poetic revolution" in England. It was during these years that the Imagist "tower" showed its fragility . With the outbreak of war, great social themes enter English poetry, a feeling of “social bitterness” is born, the hypertrophy of the individual, the subjective, is overcome, the desire and ability of poets to discover the universal in the individual and the universal in the personal is enhanced.
The period between the two world wars is a period of clear separation of forces in literature. The main trends in English literature in the 20-30s of our century are modernism, critical realism, emerging socialist realism [5, 4-10].
In the comparatively short time that elapsed between the First and Second World Wars, profound changes took place in English literature [6, 46].
English literature of the 1920s, born of deep dissatisfaction and confusion, was riddled with skepticism and bitterness. The most consistent writers of the "lost generation", abandoning the desire to show life in all its complexity and completeness, closing in on a private world, came to the destruction of their art. Proceeding from the position that life, as such, is meaningless and unpromising, and any social transformations, any social struggle are futile, they objectively presented a person as a being not only powerless, but also fatally doomed in this powerlessness. Understanding this contradiction is the key to the work of many major writers of the 1920s. The sentiments of most Lost Generation artists are summed up perfectly by the opening lines of Lawrence's last sensational novel, Lady Chatterley 's Lovers : “We live in an era that is deeply tragic, but that is precisely why we refuse to perceive it tragically. The catastrophe has happened, and we are surrounded by ruins. We begin to build new dwellings, we begin to harbor new tiny hopes. This is not an easy job: there is no smooth road to the future now, but we are looking for detours or climbing over obstacles. We need to live regardless of how many skies have fallen on us” [7, 13]. The author argues that it would be best to wipe the cause of all evil from the face of the earth - the hated machines; but since this is impossible, he concludes: “It remains only to calm down and live your life” [2, 46].
In English literature in the 1920s, there was a tense struggle between the two strands. Young innovative writers (D. Joyce, W. Wolfe, D. G. Lawrence, etc.), who were called "modernists", were criticized by writers who continued the literary tradition of the 19th century (D. Galsworthy, A. Bennet , G J. Wells). The latter reproached them for their subjectivist arbitrariness, the chaotic nature of their works, their avoidance of life and their responsibility to society. The former, in turn, criticized their literary opponents for copying life, obsessive factuality , which, in their opinion, deadened the work [8, 95]. One of the ideologists of the new trend, V. Wolfe, accused the representatives of the opposite camp of "materialism", of excessive interest in the material, objective side of the heroes' existence, of being obsessed with the "body" and not the "soul". In the article "Modern Literature" Wolfe speaks of the overabundant "sense of authenticity that embalms everything" in the works of realists, laments their lack of desire to look for new means to express the contradictory, elusive spirit of modern life. “Life is not a series of symmetrically placed lamps,” exclaims Wolfe, “life is a radiant halo, a translucent shell ... Isn’t it the task of a novelist to describe this changeable, immense spirit, no matter how difficult it may arise?” [9, 2 04-205].
In the years after the end of the First World War, the struggle of trends in English literature was sharp and intense. The influence of decadence noticeably increases in it, and literary development proceeds in a complex and contradictory way. This is facilitated by the situation that develops in England in the 20s of the twentieth century. It is characteristic that it was during this period that the term “ escapism ” (from the English escape ) arose, meaning a departure from the exciting and socially relevant , most often into the world of private life, intimate experiences. All English authors of the 1920s were looking for new ways, new forms of artistic expression, but in most cases they somehow fell into the stream of increasing decadence. If the best representatives of critical realism, who gained fame back in the 90s of the 19th century ( Galsworthy , Shaw, Wells), resisted, then others (Huxley, Lawrence), who at first acted in line with the realistic tradition, in the course of their ideological evolution gradually in the 20 1990s, they began to break with her [10, 5-9 ] .
The upheaval caused by the World War left its mark on the worldview of such writers as Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Huxley, and others, who entered literature shortly before 1914 or during the war and in subsequent years. The war and the post-war situation instilled in them a sense of the crisis of the entire civilization, a premonition of the death of mankind. They were inclined to regard the causes of the war as the perverted nature of man, as well as the excessive development of technology, which determined the destructive nature of military clashes. Linked to this is their hatred of industrialization, of the "machine age".
The ideological position of these writers determined the nature of their art. Those of them who began their journey as representatives of realism further break their ties with it, and this has a detrimental effect on their work. The main thing that separates them from critical realists is their attitude to life, to a person. Critical realists in their attitude towards people were guided by moral criteria and believed that literature should play an educational role; they sought to show life in all its complexity and fullness, to reveal its contradictions and conflicts; they were characterized by faith in social progress, in the ability of a person to improve. Representatives of anti-realist trends reject the very idea of progress. Based on the position that life as a whole is meaningless and unpromising, and man is a base creature, they do not allow the thought of striving for a better future. To the objective world, which they refused to reflect in their works, they oppose the subjective world of their heroes.
Bergson's idealistic philosophy, which affirmed the impossibility of rational cognition of reality and proclaimed the primacy of intuition over reason, opened the way to mysticism. Freud's theory explained the entire complex social life of people as a manifestation of biological instincts, "displaced" into the subconscious, but actively influencing the psyche of the individual. The departure from critical realism is noticeable in the work of David Herbert Lawrence, the son of a miner who broke with his class [2, 354-357].
Modernism, the general designation of all avant-garde trends in the visual culture of the 20th century, which programmatically opposed traditionalism as the only true “art of the present” or “art of the future”. In a stricter historical sense - the early stylistic trends of this direction (impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, modern style), in which the break with tradition was not yet as sharp and fundamental as later. Thus, modernism is not so much a synonym for avant-gardism as its precursor or early stage [9, 205].
Modernism (from the French moderne - modern), in art - the cumulative name of artistic trends that established themselves in the second half of the 19th century in the form of new forms of creativity, where not so much adherence to the spirit of nature and tradition prevailed, but the free look of the master, free to change the visible the world at its own discretion, following a personal impression, an inner idea or a mystical dream (these trends largely continued the line of romanticism). The most significant, often actively interacting areas of his were impressionism, symbolism and modernity. In Soviet criticism, the concept of "modernism" was applied in an ahistorical way to all trends in art of the 20th century that did not correspond to the canons of socialist realism [11, 5-7].
New artistic trends usually declared themselves as highly “modern” art (hence the very origin of the term), most sensitively responsive to the rhythms of the “current” time that daily covers us. The image of fresh, momentary modernity was most clearly manifested in impressionism, which, as it were, stopped the “beautiful moment”. Symbolism and modernity selected from these "instants" those that most expressively expressed the "eternal themes" of human and natural existence, connecting the past, present and future into a single cycle of memory-perception-premonition. The desire to create a special “art of the future” intensified in every possible way, utopically - sometimes through apocalyptic visions - modeling tomorrow.
Modernism embraced all kinds of creativity, but the inspiring example of literature and music (C. Baudelaire in France, R. Wagner in Germany, O. Wilde in England) was especially important.
The literature of English modernism (Joyce, Wolfe, Lawrence, Eliot), having very actively declared itself in the first post-war decade, in the 30s of the twentieth century, characterized by a social upsurge, reveals the limitations of its capabilities. The main line of development of English literature is connected with realism [12, 4-8].
In general, for the literature of the XX century. characterized by stylistic and genre diversity, non-standard literary trends that are in complex relationships. Having considered the literary situation in England at the beginning of the 20th century, we can draw the following conclusions: English literature of the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by a tense struggle between two trends: realism and modernism (realists are optimistic continuers of the tradition of the 19th century, modernists are rebel writers, pessimists who rebelled against contemporary civilization and its destructive influence on human nature). During this period, there is a sharp transition from tradition to the avant-garde, from conservatism to liberalism. Also, this period is notable for numerous innovations in the style and form of the novel: the stream of consciousness technique, myth as a form of narration, the absence of the author's figure, the unstable "I" of the hero.