Marina S. Ragachewskaya
Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus
Love discourse and love rhetoric in D. H. Lawrence's short stories
D. H. Lawrence's short stories are a complex fictional and linguistic reality. And though their thematic field lies within rather broad dimensions of human psyche, or what Weldon Thornton calls 'psychic texture', there are still a lot of undiscovered mysteries concerning Lawrence's highly elusive and subtle use of language in relation to love and sexuality. Many of the writer's short stories have an underlying love conflict - driving, or predetermining the whole plot. In some texts, Second Best for example, language appears as a secondary necessity.
The all-seeing 3d person narrator, however, is doomed to use it and to be forever within the "boundedness" of linguistic limitations. In this case, Lawrence's ingenious discovery is in use of a much broader 'love discourse' than that of words, gestures and looks.
This love discourse encompasses the landscape and animals, and metaphoric language of motions, mimicry, corporeality signs, etc. And the love rhetoric appears just the right tool in disguise, powerful enough in the art of persuading another human soul. But in the story mentioned, a love conversation does not have to sound like one – for an observer, it might sound as something about nothing.
In other texts, such as The Prussian Officer, love takes a somewhat perverted form. However, Lawrence convincingly demonstrates this very power of persuasion – no matter for the better of for the worse – acting with the help of various other rhetorical techniques: psychoanalytic portrayals and grounds for psychoanalytic interpretation, body language and mental states. "Shadows" in rose gardens and ghost-like voices walk the fictional space of Lawrence stories fulfilling, as the paper will argue, the very purpose of any rhetorical discourse: to persuade and touch the human soul. So, indeed, "the way we think about love is conditioned by the way we talk about love...and more so by the way others talk to us about love".