Mining writer Lawrence
Du Jinming
Bring the English novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885--1930) said that the writer of the mining area, as far as I am concerned, is somewhat suspicious of climbing relatives, because I happen to be a person who lives in the mining area and likes to play with words. Indeed, for such a modern foreign writer who has achieved great achievements and has many controversies, it is not rigorous to apply the habit of the domestic literary circles to locate writers by region or creative theme and background, which is not rigorous, and even very unscientific and unscientific. Fortunately, I am not a scholar, nor have I ever thought of writing this point of my handwriting at best as a level of reading after reading, and hooking up with lofty scholarship, I also have a sense of immunity similar to fairy tales almost heavenly, so as not to lose my innocence and frankly attribute what I see as a British gangster-level writer in the mining area within my sight,—— who makes the writing of this British tycoon always unable to get rid of the trivial and humble background of the mining area?
D. H. Lawrence (1885--1930)
There is no doubt that Lawrence was known through "Madame Chatterley's Lover." I wanted to fall under the pomegranate skirt of "Madame Chateaulet" like me, and learned that the Chinese readers of Lawrence's name were certainly not in the minority, because the fame and sales of Lawrence's book almost overshadowed all his achievements. In view of this, I would like to briefly describe the story synopsis of the novel here, which is superfluous, which just caters to my habit of waiting for opportunities and laziness. As soon as this novel came out, it immediately caused great controversy in the European and American literary circles. In particular, the book's heroine Connie and the hunter Mellers's in-depth, delicate and poetic sexual depictions during their rendezvous meeting, like a "flying vortex", were regarded by the British authorities as "offensive", which directly led to the fate of the book being sealed, and was not released until twenty-eight years after Lawrence's death. I read Madame Chatterley's Lover in the early 1990s. I'm ashamed to say that I read a pirated version, and I still don't even know who the translator of the text is, or when the book was translated into China, or what kind of legendary twists and turns it has undergone. In fact, it is not surprising that in the old capitalist country of advocating constitutionalism and freedom of the press, the United Kingdom was still regarded as a "pornographic book" that was "harmful and divided", and the possibility of buying a genuine copy in the remote mining area of northwest China, where I live, is of course close to zero. Therefore, I could only be stubborn to challenge the limit of patience, tolerate typos in the book, and read the pirated version again and again. Fortunately, I am rough and literate enough to correct typos in the book, so when I read it for the third time, I have confidently restored the original face of the book to the greatest extent. Of course, I don't want to hide from you that if it weren't for the wonderful and soul-destroying sex descriptions in the book, I wouldn't have had such good patience and such a great interest. When I read this book, although I was an adult on the legal level, I was still an unmarried youth, and the temptation of the sexual depiction in the book to me was conceivable and self-evident. However, temptation returns to temptation, and what masturbates is that I am not lured to commit crimes as the righteous gentleman scholars fear, not only have I not been lured to commit crimes, but I can even conceitedly say that it is this "offensive" book that has made me truly experience the charm of literature and art, appreciate the magical effects and potential of linguistic decay, and also make me have a purely healthy understanding of sex through Lawrence's beautiful written expression (although it is seriously polluted by typos in the stolen version,—— Sex was originally so noble and beautiful, she was not dirty, and it was not sinful; sex was a poetic journey of life, the only passage through which man returned to nature and returned to his nature to become a child, and it was also the ladder that man himself carried by the immortal. So far, I think that no writer has described sex as purely as Lawrence, especially the grasp of the beauty of sex, its free and flying writing, the undulating lyricism, and the human and aesthetic light emitted by it, which seem to me to be unparalleled. But it is necessary to say here that the description of sex and the description of sex I think there is an essential difference, can not be confused, the description of sex focuses on the concept of human nature and the spiritual level, sexual description is only pure biology, pure instinctive desire and physical exhibition. Depiction of sex should be an aesthetic category.
In addition to the artistic charm of Madame Chatterley itself, another reason that made me obsessed with this book was that the story scene depicted in the book was related to the mining area. This is almost a reason that cannot be a reason, but it is a real reason for me. The fact that a novel written by a foreign writer can have a greater or less connection with my life gives me a certain inexplicable closeness. The mining area of central England at the beginning of the twentieth century presented in the novel feels a little hazy similar to the mining area where I live. Clifford Chateaulet's ancestral mansion was built in the mid-eighteenth century on a beautiful oak-lined hill where miners mostly live in the smoky chimneys of the nearby mining area and the misty village of Dawasha on a distant hill. "This village almost begins next to the garden gate, stretching extremely ugly for a mile, with rows of shabby and dirty brick-walled huts, black stone roofs, sharp corners, with infinite sadness." In the mansion of Legbechathettalle one could "hear the roar of the shearers in the pits, the jets of the winches, the crash of the heavy-duty minecarts as they change tracks, and the rough whistle of the locomotives." "The coal embankment of Dawasha is always burning," and when the wind blows from there, the house is filled with the smell of sulfur after the burning of the rot, and even when there is no wind, the air is filled with a strange smell that can only be found in the cellar. "On the flowers and leaves in front of the house and behind the house," there was always a layer of coal ash, as if it were black nectar falling from the sky. ”......
Although Lawrence's pen is full of hatred and hatred for industrial society and the mining area, and many commentators at home and abroad generally believe that "Madame Chatterley's Lover" expresses the opposition and conflict between industrial civilization and nature in the whole internal system and thought, in these descriptions, I smell the smell of fireworks in the mining area that I am familiar with, although this smell is a little pungent, but as a miner who grew up in the mining area, in any case, I can't help but feel kind.
In the 1990s, when I was living in a mining compound consisting of "rows of dirty brick-walled huts", as Lawrence described, a neighbor, who was injured and paralyzed in the mine, became a waste, and his wife was unwilling to be lonely and fornicated, and the whole mining area was hyped up for a while. Influenced by "Madame Chatterley's Lover", I had conceived of writing a novella based on this theme, but in the process of writing, I could not get rid of the shadow of "Madame Chatterley's Lover", so I had to give up. And the only thing I'm reluctant and slightly confused about so far is why Lawrence didn't write CliffOrd Chateaulet as a crippled mine owner or miner? If you don't write it as a miner, but you arrange the story in the mining area, and dig out the veins of others digging this theme along the way, I think this guy has done something really amazing.
After reading "Madame Chatterley's Lover", I fell in love with Lawrence like a demon, and tried everything to search for Lawrence's books, from the early "White Peacock" to the same controversial "Rainbow", "Son and Lover", "Woman in Love" and so on once entered my reading horizons. But overall, none of these works constituted a great reading temptation for me like "Madame Chatterley's Lover", although "Rainbow" is considered to be Lawrence's best and most mature work, and the reading memory of my brain is not as deep as the former, but this does not affect Lawrence's literary status in my mind. While reading Lawrence, I also have a general understanding of Lawrence's life and life. This writer, who seems to me to be a british veteran, really has a complex with the mining area that is constantly cut and messed up. Lawrence was never a miner, but he was born into a miner's house in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, where his father Waser was an authentic miner and his mother, Lydia, was the daughter of a lace maker. This arrogant, well-educated woman who likes light clothes, at a Christmas ball, met the miner Hosse, who was almost illiterate but did not lose the charm of men, and fell in love at first sight, although somewhat unexpected, but also reflected the original irrationality of love. However, after marriage, when the fog of love is dispelled by reality, the petty bourgeois family, some aristocratic ladies Lydia has no suspense about the miner's husband who deals with black coal all day, has a psychological imbalance and disgust, coupled with the dirty and poor mining area, the survival is difficult, the spiritual and material life is equally scarce, and the husband is like almost all the miners in the world, who is addicted to alcoholism, Lawrence's mother inevitably has a full belly of complaints and complaints, and the family relationship was once very disharmonious. It's not hard to imagine that Lawrence's childhood was probably spent in the endless quarrels of his parents. Lawrence did not have a good feeling for his father as a miner, and loved his mother deeply, under the influence of his mother, he was also full of disgust and hatred for the life of the mining area from childhood, he was withdrawn, not good at communicating and interacting with people, rarely had good friends and partners, until he finished elementary school in the Eastwood mining area, the mining area in his eyes was always gray and lacked sunshine.
I said this in a small essay entitled "Childhood Memories or Hometown", "For a writer or a writer, childhood memories are like genetic genes that affect his lifelong creation, and the hometown rooted in childhood, like a shadow, will always accompany him, even if he soars to the top and his family moves to the high-rise buildings of the bustling city, or sees through the red dust and the remote huts of the remote countryside, this shadow will be entangled with him like a childhood partner." "To this day, I still agree with my statement. Yes, the influence of childhood on writers is not insignificant, and for some writers, such as García Márquez in Colombia, Mo Yan in China, and even Lawrence, who I am nagging at the moment, the impression of childhood has become almost the entire background of their creations. Therefore, it is not surprising that Lawrence's pen always cannot get rid of the background of the mining area. But whether it is "Madame Chatterley's Lover", or "Son and Lover", or "Woman in Love" and other works, Lawrence's pen has never directly penetrated into the mining area, but always cruised on the edge of the mining area or the surface of the mining area, and at the same time, to a large extent, it uses the heroine's vision to represent the mining area, I think this is related to Lawrence's failure to be a miner on the one hand, and related to the influence of his mother on the other hand. In Madame Chatterley's Lover, the sights and smells of the mining area are rendered through Connie, which has been described earlier and will not be repeated. In "The Woman in Love", it is shown through what Ursula and Gozhen, two young girls who are in love, see and hear along the way to see the wedding of a member of the Krich family. They came to the main road of the small mining city of Beddorf and saw that "this street is very wide, with shops and houses on the side of the road, but the layout is scattered and the street surface is dirty." As they walked through a dark, dirty field, from a distance," there were coal mines scattered, and on the opposite hill of the coal mine was a dark wheat field and forest, as if shrouded in a black veil. From time to time, white smoke and black smoke rise from the solid chimney, like a dark and dull sky changing magic. Nearby are rows of houses, up the hillside leading up to the top of the hill. They walk on the road, "the road is also dark, the road is stepped on by the feet of the miners who commute to work every day." The roadside was surrounded by an iron fence, and the fence gates were polished by the thick cargo pants that came in and out. The sisters walked on the road in the middle of several rows of improvised sheds and felt " It was even more shabby here, and the women stood whispering in the distance, wearing coarse cloth aprons, with their hands crossed over their chests. They stared at the Bronwyn sisters like natives with straight-hooked eyes, and the children were chasing and frolicking, screaming foul language in their mouths. In Ge Zhen's eyes, "This is another world, it's crazy"...
Lawrence is a representative anti-industrialist writer who pays attention to the opposition and conflict between industrial machines and man and nature. The industrial civilization represented by the mining area was developed at the expense of encroaching on and destroying nature. Industry has destroyed vast tracts of forest, meadows, and agricultural fields, and because of the coal mines, there have been some "strange mounds and black spots"; he believes that the mind and nature of modern man have been severely suppressed and destroyed by the industrial machine, thus making the relationship between man and society, man and woman, incompatible. In Lawrence's eyes, women are the embodiment of nature and beauty, and industrial machines and the environment destroyed by industrialization are even more incompatible with women. Therefore, he is keen to ingest the dirty and ugly scenes of the mining area into the eyes of women, and express them through the female perspective, which undoubtedly produces greater contrasts and more disgusting. Lawrence is good at expressing the external environment of the mining area, and at the same time it is extremely emotional, that is, his rendering of the mining scene is mixed with personal subjective tendencies. Since Lawrence was a staunch critic of industrial civilization, the mining area was only dirty and ugly to him, without any sunshine or beauty, and even the miners themselves were ugly, stupid, and even lacking in humanity. The emergence of this emotional color, and even the formation of the writer's worldview, is directly related to the memory left in childhood and the influence of the mother.
In The Autobiographical Novel "Sons and Lovers", Lawrence's brushstrokes, although directly into the miner's families, have been considered by many critics to portray the poverty and ugliness of the mines in the central British and the tragic life of coal miners to the fullest. But in my opinion, the life of the mining area and the miners depicted in this novel is still incompatible with the struggle and struggle of the miners against nature. The novel focuses on the mental confusion and psychological obstacles of the protagonist Paul on the road of life, and highlights the "Oedipal Complex". The miner Morel (Paul's father) is not the protagonist of the novel, the mining area still appears only as a necessary scene or background for writing, and Lawrence's ink focus is consistent in his love, humanity and ethics, rather than on the miner's struggle with nature and industrial machinery. Of course, I am not here to argue that Lawrence should dig in this regard, but only to say that Lawrence is the son of a miner who cruises on the edge of the mine, a writer who uses the edge of the mine or the surface of the mine as a background to vent his creative passion. But that doesn't deny that Lawrence is a mining writer. Because although Lawrence never had any good feelings for the mining area, he was always mentally obsessed with the mining area; he was wandering and wandering all his life, and until his death, he did not find a pure land that could really make him rest and recuperate, and in his creation, he never left the mother land of the Iswood mine in Nottinghamshire. So, to describe Lawrence as a mining writer, I don't think it's too far-fetched or anything abrupt about the writer.