Warped and Distilled?

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

This is a rather odd way to describe Mr. Pynchon’s fiction. At the end
of the twentieth century, novelists like Pynchon continue to explore and
develop new subject matter, new style, and new technique. In addition,
Pynchon and others are engaged in a radical reconsideration of the
relationship between reality and fiction; a consideration begun at the
beginning of this century by their Modernist predecessors. Are the
historical novels of D.H. Lawrence(The Rainbow, Women in Love)
“fable-ized” truths? The cultural changes he describes in these novels
are as real in the conventional and historical sense as the Vietnam War
and student protests of the 1960s. Progressive industrialization is a
powerful force in these novels, but the history we read in D.H.
Lawrence’s fiction is concerned with human consciousness and the
unconscious life of characters living and loving in the age of
accelerating cultural transformation. Lawrence’s fiction is not
distilled or warped commentary anymore than Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’
is a “fabel-ized representation of possible truths."  In the middle of
this novel we get an idea of what history-bereft of human experience and
artistic expression would mean.