The Prussian Officer by D.H. Lawrence, 1914
The magic trick:
Putting characters in a makeshift society and observing how social norms both distort and linger
Talk about an intense reading experience. The language is lush. The plot moves slowly, leaving the reader (and author?) the chance to savor every description and every emotional swing. It struck me as overindulgent. Not something I’d want to read every week. But there’s no denying the quality here.
I’ve buried the lead here, though. The story itself is remarkably transgressive for 1914. An Army captain feels some kind of sexual attraction to his orderly. These feelings, combined with a multilayered jealousy of the orderly’s love letters to his girlfriend, result in the captain abusing the orderly. When you add in the aforementioned maximalist storytelling method, you can imagine why I said it’s such an intense read.
It’s a very interesting example of taking men out of regular society, placing them in a makeshift community, and watching how those societal norms linger and distort in complicated ways.
And that’s quite a trick on Lawrence’s part.
The selection:
In spite of himself, the Captain could not regain his neutrality of feeling towards his orderly. Nor could he leave the man alone. In spite of himself, he watched him, gave him sharp orders, tried to take up as much of his time as possible. Sometimes he flew into a rage with the young soldier, and bullied him. Then the orderly shut himself off, as it were out of earshot, and waited, with sullen, flushed face, for the end of the noise. The words never pierced to his intelligence, he made himself, protectively, impervious to the feelings of his master.
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