Rhetoric as Idea: D. H. Lawrence's Genre Theory - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Joan Douglas Peters

For an author who makes such creative use of language and its semantic possibilities that he invents his own epistemological vocabulary, D. H. Lawrence has received surprisingly little critical attention for his innovations in the novel at the level of text. [1] Because the arena of linguistical experimentation for Lawrence was mostly in metaphysics (he even explains his use of obscenity in epistemological terms), the impulse of readers has been to treat his literary language as if it were foreign, to translate it into intelligible doctrine without examining its function as language, without looking at what it does as well as what it says. This same impulse, I believe, accounts for why Lawrence has never been adequately acknowledged for his work in his theory of the novel as a genre. [2]

Although a number of essays and chapters and two complete books consider Lawrence as a literary critic, it has been over ten years since anything significant has been published in this area, and what has been published usually discusses his responses to other writers' works. [3] Except perhaps in passing, few critics seem comfortable addressing those strange, forceful essays Lawrence devotes to the novel as a literary form--"The Novel," "Surgery for the Novel--Or a Bomb," "Morality and the Novel," "Why the Novel Matters"--and the reason for the critics' discomfort is not hard to fathom. While there is something endearing, even convincing about Lawrence's rhetorical style, its forced spontaneity, personal vehemence, and unqualified dogmatism seem inherently to undermine how seriously we can take his critical doctrine. The standard response to his genre criticism, where there is any response at all, is to ignore the rhetoric and somehow to extract a serious and consistent set of beliefs. [4] By isolating state ments of workable dogma from their rhetorical context, critics do achieve some sort of coherent meaning from the apparent confusion of Lawrentian rhetoric, but at the same time they also reduce Lawrence's genre theory to much less than it is or can be. [5]

Certainly the main impetus behind Lawrence's genre theory, as it was behind similar work by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford, was primarily rhetorical. The theory, that is, was not as much concerned with defining or elucidating the critical terms of the novel as a form as with persuading people that the genre was worthy of critical attention as genre and thereby worthy of critical respect. Although Lawrence, of course, would never address this issue directly, other novelists constantly, explicitly, point out in their genre criticism that because it had never been formally analyzed, because, as Virginia Woolf puts it, no rules had been drawn up, "no thinking done on her behalf," the novel at the time was not taken seriously enough. James, Woolf, and Ford tried to remedy the situation by drawing up rules themselves, mostly by stressing the importance of the novel as craft--James, for example, explaining in his "Prefaces" the blueprints and conceptual rationales behind his individual novels, and Ford setting out the specific techniques of his own practice of impressionism. But while Lawrence, who theoretically despised any notion of literature as craft, also openly proselytizes for the novel as a serious art form, he does so in an entirely different manner.

For Lawrence, as for his major contemporaries, language was always on some level subversive, and the novel was similarly conceived as a subversive genre-- one aimed at undermining established conventions of realism and at demythologizing more traditional literary forms. Whereas other modern novelists also incorporated this subversive strategy into the style of their nonfiction prose, none did so as pervasively and emphatically as Lawrence did. Bakhtin's idea of carnival is particularly applicable to Lawrence's genre theory in ways that distinguish his criticism from that of other novelists writing at the same time (see Problems 122-27). For Bakhtin, carnival is a system of rhetorical discourse employed to challenge, entirely on the level of text, established conventions of genre. Using "ritualized laughter," carnival functions to undermine the language of literary authority and, in its place, effect a new "world order" of genre. If we consider Bakhtin's four categories of carnival, we see how concretely Lawr ence's theoretical essays on the novel clearly and enthusiastically embrace this comedic tradition. These categories, which include (I) the institutionalizing of "free and familiar contact between people" (with Lawrence, an informality and accessibility of critical style); (2) a collapsing of hierarchical distinctions; (3) the legitimizing of "carnivalistic blasphemies," including obscenities and parodies of sacred texts; and (4) most prominent in Lawrence's genre theory, the privileging of eccentricity, all describe Lawrence's own critical strategies for debunking established generic conventions, subverting the authority of established critical discourse, proposing new concepts of genre, and promoting the novel as form. Since all four categories also clearly situate themselves at the level of style--indeed for Bakhtin, carnival was "functional and not substantive" -- we have to look to the rhetoric of Lawrence's critical discourse, rather than at its dogma, to recognize its significance as subversive genre t heory.