Dimensions of Consciousness in the Tales

Abstract

Australia had not provided Lawrence with an answer to his basic questions. Oppressed by the negativity of the war years, he was still faced with the task of discovering a way forward that would satisfy his desire for positive achievement. His first impulse was to go back to the mode in which he had already experimented: the shorter fictions which he later came to call ‘Tales’. This form he had used for his early fictions, including those which Jessie Chambers and Louie Burrows submitted on his behalf to the Nottingham Guardian for their Christmas competition in 1907. Taking them into his work as a whole, he had seen that fictions of this kind might provide forms embodying the reconciliation between documentary realisn and symbolic artistic structure that he was coming to see as necessary for future projects.