Robert's Reviews > The Fox

After a certain age (perhaps 30? perhaps as early as 20?), one probably shouldn't read too much of DH Lawrence's writing, or too little of it. Now and again I return to his fiction, poetry, and essays either to reread something or take on a new work. He's a unique, over-the-top, incantatory, powerful writer whose contribution to human psychology remains unverified by almost anyone else. When I say this I'm not referring to his exploitation of oedipal themes, per Freud (Sons and Lovers), but of course his notions about blood consciousness, a metaphysical conviction that he reduces to this primitive image: something in the blood that binds people together, tears them apart, gives them ecstasy in being subjugated (or the reverse), and fills their spiritual nostrils with scents of both liberation and damnation.

Leaving that explicit formulation (blood consciousness) and its typical instantiation (a struggle between men and women)aside, I'm left with the peculiar intimate force of Lawrence's writing, which in small doses does achieve a kind of supplemental echo, boosting the force of the narrative and creating, for me at least, a heightened sense that ordinary life is a high stakes game.

How does he do it? In rereading The Fox the other day, I commented to myself how often Lawrence repeated certain words, particularly in passages where the lead female protagonist, is striving for understanding through self-castigation. The words in these passages were, over and over again, "failure," "responsibility," and "reaching," either repeated exactly or slightly altered, so that "failure" might become "failing," or "reaching" might become "reach.

This is very tiny stuff, but more than "style." It struck me that Lawrence was using prose to replicate "how we think" not through stream-of-consciousness, per se, but in an equally interesting, and perhaps more powerful way. March hates the way she feels she has let her friend Jill down and comes so easily under the sway of the fox-killing Henry. She doesn't simply reach a conclusion about this, however. In Lawrence's hands, she broods about it, endures it, and repeats it to herself the way one does over time (days, weeks, or months of a crisis that won't let you alone). And Lawrence achieves this mood through his gnawing, stuck repetitions, drawing you in.

The paradox and the irony of The Fox as a powerful novella is that Henry gets March for himself, but in the process, he kills her, as he killed the fox, and as he also kills Jill.

This is all murky and suspect, and yet, because March resigns herself to a living death at Henry's side, it has the quality of something more real than real. A splendid novel.