December 2022. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
1928, Delphi Classics, 443 pages. Written in English, read in English
Some novels travel on two parallel tracks. There is the track on which the novel itself is placed — its narrative, its context and its impact on society; then there is the track on which the novel has a symbolic meaning beyond its narrative and its actual content. There are a lot of cases in which people know what a given novel is about without having read it, and this is generally due to that second track. Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s second track involves the fact that while it was written originally in English, by a British novelist, the full book was not published in Great Britain until 1960. And when it was, by Penguin, the publisher went on trial, based on violating a law that was put into place only a year prior.
From a marketing perspective, of course, Penguin were very happy about the trial and its coverage, and even happier about the outcome. Even potential readers who did not know about the novel were curious to read about it now, and the second track took full force — almost everybody who’s interested in literature knows that in the novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, the eponymous lady has an extra-matrimonial affair with the groundskeeper of her husband’s estate, an affair that is very graphically portrayed by the author. Specifically what the British court, on behalf of the queen, was upset about, was the groundskeeper’s frequent use of the words “fuck” and “cunt”, never before printed in a novel, and not participating in the type of language a magistrate, or a reader of the same standing in society, would expect from a classic novel. Eventually the magistrate in question was convinced, through the continued support of fellow novelists and thought-leaders, that there is a place for obscenity in a piece of literature if it serves the purpose of the literature itself.
Following on all of that incidental fame that the novel has accumulated in its second track, we are left with the first track — that of the novel’s qualities as a piece of literature by itself. Its narrative, its context, its contribution to the canon of literature. And modern readers who have been travelling safely on that other track, like me, and have not read the novel before, realize now that it’s simply a boring novel.
Back when it was first published, in 1928, in Italy and France, it may have been a groundbreaking piece of literature. It was ten years after the end of the first world war and the world has changed; Britain was starting to lose its grip on the world as an empire on which the sun never sets, and aristocracy started to lost its prestige, and the novel was trying to show a microcosm of these two worlds — the old British caste system and the new class leveler that war is — by the simplest concept of love between subjects of these two worlds. Within the portrayal of this clash, Lawrence had used the language and descriptions that would clarify the significance of this clash, and those were supposed to shock readers of the same social status as baronet Chatterley’s in the same way that they may have shocked him. But after ninety five years of new definitions of where the boundary between literary and obscene lies, and more “fuck”s and “cunt”s in any cultural medium than stars in the heavens, the novel loses its sharp edge and what remains, is what appears to be a poorly constructed narrative that tries to bind together a series of philosophical debates about the importance of the body vs. the mind, about the plight of the working class, about the British caste system and modern feudalism, about living internally and externally.
After all of it is said and done, the last chapter of the book is the only redeeming aspect of it — Mellors, the groundskeeper, has been let go of his work, following a scandal not even related to his affair with Lady Chatterley; they both decide to marry after they complete their divorces, and to establish a farm. The last of the final chapter is a letter from Mellors to Constance Chattereley, in which he elaborates on his hopes for the future. We don’t know if this future ever materializes, and this open ending almost redeems the rest of the novel.
The January 2023 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be 1984 by George Orwell.
The February 2023 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
