Elizabeth Sargent
University of Alberta, Canada
Alt Dis (Alternative Discourse), D. H. Lawrence, and the Teaching of Writing
Lawrence scholars may be unaware of the way in which Lawrence's nonfiction has been used in the field of Writing Studies as a major example of Alt.Style or Alt Dis (Alternative Discourse)--or what Winston Weathers' classic text on the subject (An Alternate Style: Options in Composition, 1980) refers to as "Grammar B." Weathers focuses particularly on Studies in Classic American Literature to show how Lawrence "circles and probes; lists and repeats; truncates the paragraph; plays with words; double-voices by way of the questions/answers of an ongoing interior dialogue . . . " to convey the intensity of his convictions. Indeed, according to Weathers,"Lawrence uses Grammar B to communicate more than thesis and demonstration; he uses alternate style to communicate his own energy, involvement—less to make us agree with him, more to provoke us into dealing ourselves with the literary/cultural issues he raises. For Lawrence, the alternate style is one of display/stimulation—in contrast with Grammar A's proposition/proof."
But the attention of writing specialists to Lawrence's essays didn't end with the release of Weathers' book. Indeed, composition scholars are still pointing to Lawrence's nonfiction as a possible model for alternative forms of academic writing. Toby Fulwiler's College Writing (2002) uses Lawrence's work as an example of double-voice and collage. And, while serving as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard, Gordon Harvey published a short piece suggesting that Lawrence's nonfiction should be studied by first-year students: I have students compile, based on the semester so far and my comments on their essays, a list of qualities that make for persuasive essay writing. These usually include sticking to a single thesis; not repeating oneself; having a clear and tight progression of thought; supplying concrete facts and evidence for claims; being calm, trustworthy, and fair (e.g. by making balanced concessions to other viewpoints and qualifying ones' position); maintaining a consistent and serious tone; and writing in a way that doesn't call attention to itself and especially not to one's mood or personality. Lawrence's prose . . . doesn't follow these rules. And yet one is irresistibly drawn along by it. . . . Lawrence's prose arguments get much of their power from forbidden sources—from being nonreasonable and nontransparent. (236-37).
More and more specialists in the teaching of writing are working to change our thinking about academic discourse. For example, building on Weathers and Stewart's argument that our current default paradigm for "good" writing—"thesis statement, supporting generalization and examples, conclusion"—might in fact be shielding us "from insights which another, less rigid paradigm, might generate," Patricia Bizzell, Helen Fox, and Christopher Schroeder challenge the hegemony of current paradigms of academic discourse in Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy (2002) by arguing that new forms of writing "make possible new forms of intellectual work."
Composition scholars are thus creating a climate in which Lawrence's nonfiction may be read differently—not least as part of a tradition of developing and using certain powerful strategies and effects of the alternate style for all of our thinking (disjunction, juxtaposition, crots, lists, labyrinthine sentences, fragments, double-voice or polyphony, repetitions and refrains, collage or montage, orthographic schemes and foreign words, language variegation, synchronicity). It's one thing to be using such strategies in a novel, but according to Weathers "Lawrence moved the alternate style into a prestigious forum—that of literary criticism." So necessary to Lawrence's thinking was his characteristic circling and probing, his "pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination," that he couldn't limit it to fiction alone.
By a close examination and discourse analysis of one short essay ("On Being Religious"), I hope not only to illustrate Lawrence's remarkable skill at Grammar B/Alt Dis, but to also help us imagine an academy in which all the devices, voices, and strategies of the verbal arts were available to scholars and taken seriously as forms of thinking; an academy in which we were able to use (and mix, as needed) all imaginable genres (poetry, drama, fiction, creative nonfiction, letter, interview, collage, mosaic, segmented essay, business memo, meander, loop, lab report) in order to do our work. To Lawrence, it was obvious that there were certain kinds of thinking we could not do, certain questions we could not explore, using traditional forms. And if an alternative discourse, style, or structure is needed to do the intellectual work we most need and want to do (and that our field most needs), then we need to draw on Lawrence's expertise.