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

Style, Spring, 2000 by Joan Douglas Peters

While one would say of a novelist like Woolf particularly (but also of James and Ford) that what distinguishes her critical prose on the novel is her personal style, one would probably say of Lawrence that his critical essays are distinguished not so much by a style as by a voice. What Lawrence manages to achieve through this voice is a kind of double-voiced discourse, and this achievement, ironically, is something Bakhtin asserts is not actually possible with authoritative, rhetorical prose of this kind. Despite the obvious grounding of Lawrence's rhetorical genre theory in his theory of carnival and despite his own recognition that the carnivalistic in literature is, in fact, a rhetorical device ("functional not substantive"), Bakhtin himself would not admit Lawrence's genre theory into this camp precisely because it is genre theory. When he explains why works of authorial rhetoric cannot be genuinely double-voiced, however, Bakhtin's reasoning obviously depends on a logocentric reading of that rhetoric, t he kind of reading that has traditionally been given to Lawrence's theory of the novel. [13] When Bakhtin contends that it "is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us; rather it demands our unconditional allegiance," he does offer up an apt description of the logocentric surface of Lawrence's rhetorical prose. But when Bakhtin goes on to specify the ramifications of this kind of discourse, he instead demonstrates how his theory on the single-voicedness of authorial rhetoric does not apply to Lawrence:

Therefore authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and divisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority--with political power, an institution, a person--and it stands and falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up--agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. Therefore the distance we ourselves observe visa-vis this authoritative discourse remains unchallenged in all its projections: a playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here possible.

(Dialogic Imagination 343)

The dynamics of a deconstructive reading of Lawrence's critical prose calls into question at every point Bakhtin's definition of the truly authoritative discourse in this passage, and it does so in Bakhtin's own terms.

By presenting ideas as spoken, the style of Lawrence's critical doctrine does genuinely invite rejoinder, or challenge, from those with conflicting opinions, thereby opening up the discourse dialogically. Even more important, the substance of Lawrence's genre theory, created entirely by its rhetoric, overcomes everything Bakhtin says here about the limitations of all authoritative prose--that it "permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it"--and it accomplishes that by giving a lie to Bakhtin's more basic point that "authorial discourse cannot be represented but only transmitted" (Dialogic Imagination 344). By creating a theoretical discourse that gets its meaning primarily through its own deconstruction, that itself textually and rhetorically enacts a doctrine on the relativity of all truth, including its own, Lawrence does objectify or "represent," his authorial discourse rather than simply tr ansmit it. In the process he contradicts, exposes the limitations of, and at the same time approves the human voice overtly speaking in the essays, a voice which, like many strong, fully-evolved human voices asserts its own truth as absolute in implicit dialogical confrontation with other voices presenting their own contradictory truths in the same way.