ВЕСТНИК ПЕРМСКОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 2015 РОССИЙСКАЯ И ЗАРУБЕЖНАЯ ФИЛОЛОГИЯ Вып. 2(30) УДК 821.111-31 THE SUBVERSION OF LINEAR TIME 1 IN ‘SONS AND LOVERS’ BY D.H. LAWRENCE Boris M. Proskurnin Professor, Head of the Department of World Literature and Culture Perm State University 15, Bukireva st., Perm, 614990, Russia. bproskurnin@yandex.ru The essay is devoted to the issues of art time in one of the most known novels of D.H. Lawrence. The issues of time were central for the modernist writers since they showed the prevalence of an individual’s experience of life over the life itself; they were preoccupied with proper depicting of a person’s inner living through external circumstances, especially when a young hero enters the world, perceives it and experiences heavy growth costs as it happens with the main character of ‘Sons and Lovers’. The novel under analysis is constructed on the basis of several genetic plot patterns: socio-panoramic, biographical and autobiographical and psycho-analytical, and each of them influences the time-structure of the novel. The essay shows how a complex temporal structure – a unity of family, biographical, personal time and socio-historical time, epic time, transpersonal, eternal time – works in the novel and determines its general artistic peculiarities. The author argues that D.H. Lawrence, for the purpose of giving the fullest, by his account, picture of the main character’s internal conversion of the events of his growing up, unites traditional (realistic) and experimental (modernist) temporal paradigms, having kept general linear forward time-movement, retards, or/and hastens the flux of narrated time. Key words: English literature; D.H. Lawrence; modernism; realism; art time; novel; Bildungsroman; character. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) seems to be not so much read and analyzed as his Women in Love (1921) or Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) [see: Roberts, Poplawski 2001]. But still it is one of the most popular novels of his and quite well thought of by the critics through the whole hundred 2 years of its existence . It is traditionally looked at as the first novel in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. It is liked by many due to its intimate narration of life in the times of crucial changes when former social and moral values were challenged by modernity. It is the novel in which some crucial peculiarities of D.H. Lawrence’s art are displayed with their bright vividness and clearness. At the same time, it is the novel where the author works out some new principles of character- and milieu-depicting, which no longer ties him so soundly to the tradition of the XIX century novel: The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love are the novels, as we all know, of another type to much extent. As Michael Bell argues, some episodes in Sons and Lovers (for example, the scene with Mrs. Morel being driven out the house by a drunk hus- band in the garden at night and the love-making scene of Clara and Paul) ‘anticipate the mature Lawrence’ [Bell 2003: 136]. The issues of Time are, no doubt, core issues of the ideology of modernism and the fiction of the period [see: Ushakova 2010]. Practically it has become a commonplace in any study of the modernist literature to refer to the works of Henry Bergson and Albert Einstein with their ideas of subjectivity and relativity of time [see: Bradbury, MacFarlane 1976]. These ideas influenced immensely the writers of the period, who were very much preoccupied with the aspects of time, with its subjectivization through the minds of depicted characters, with predominant asymmetrical relations of the past, present and future times in inner world of a literary hero, which results in various shifts along the time coordinate. There are some principal peculiarities of art time in English modernist fiction analyzed in the interesting essay of Elizaveta Brezhneva ‘Outer Time’ and ‘Inner Time’ in Poetics of Virginia Woolf’s Novels’ [Brezhneva 2011]. The author of the essay argues that English modernists’ © Proskurnin B.M., 2015 112