Indian Writing

For another thing—to sound a little Lawrentian for a moment—the old intimacy between people and the natural world has essentially disappeared from fiction, the line between human and nonhuman sometimes literally drawn in red ink: when William Maxwell wrote a (great) scene from a dog’s point of view in So Long, See You Tomorrow, his editors at The New Yorker wanted it cut on the grounds of sentimentality. The sentimental is a category like the pornographic, but more subtly enforced. Where did this new censorship originate, and how did it insinuate itself so deeply into literary practice? It is post-Lawrentian, and may be connected to his fall from grace. Unlike pornography, the sentimental seems not a consciously constructed and enforced social category, but a sort of fact, just as the ridiculous seems self-evidently ridiculous: it’s actually quite hard to explain why something is ridiculous. But someone writing a scene like that in Women in Love when a distraught Birkin shucks his clothes off and walks into the woods—”the soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft sharp needles”—would likely come in for ridicule, because solace comes to fictional characters now in many ways, but not through contact with living things, unless they’re human. Yet: why? Losing Lawrence, we relegate his list of necessary relationships—with “stone, earth, trees, flower, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures”—to outworn modes of fiction. If young writers can rarely name more than a dozen plants within a ten-mile radius of their writing desks, this isn’t seen as detrimental to their work’s verisimilitude, since the nonhuman world plays almost no part in contemporary fiction. It’s as if this silence in fiction anticipates a hundred thousand species’ extinction in the actual world. Lawrence would be enraged.