POETICS OF DESIRE IN D.H. LAWRENCE’S SHORTER FICTION

Desire is a specific subject of research in many areas, including literary studies and text analysis. The representation of desire in fiction is an inseparable part of the sub-genre of psychological prose; its interpretation by readers and scholars requires an interdisciplinary approach and relies on psychoanalytic theories and terminology for elucidation. Shorter psychological fiction – novellas and short stories – depend on the authors’ mastery of language use, while the formal textual length is limited. Therefore, the study of desire encoded in a short fictional piece is both difficult due to laconism and suggestiveness, and fruitful as a revelation of most subtle nuances of human nature through the examination of artistic discourse. D.H. Lawrence’s novellas and short stories articulate desire as the unconscious wish to obtain the object of love. It is the merit of the writer’s art to employ various artistic means that may serve as the manifest content. Interpreting imagery and symbolism, bodily consciousness and characters’ “syncopated” dialogues, opens up such aspects of a textual embodiment of desire as its elusiveness, impossibility to verbalize and often its “forbidden” nature. Instead, the Ragachewskaya Marina writer resorts to heavy suggestiveness, gaps and silences to be filled with the reader’s intuitive or professional knowledge, meaning-charged adjectives, metaphors and analytical intrusions. Examples from a selection of D.H. Lawrence’s short fictional works reveal defense mechanisms that balance the fulfilment of desire. The mastery of D.H. Lawrence’s shorter fiction rests on the skill to reveal the unnamable, to show the inner conflict working through desire fulfilment, to bring to consciousness the shame, guilt and pleasure irrespective of moral judgment.