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

Style, Spring, 2000 by Joan Douglas Peters

In D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic, David Gordon says of Lawrence's critical use of metaphors that "having turned to them for their greater emotional precision, he seems to resent their logical imprecision and to insist, in both art and criticism, that he is not using metaphor but expressing a literal truth" (9-10). It seems to me, on the contrary, that Lawrence, like Paul Ricoeur, sees no discrepancy between the use of metaphor and the expression of literal truth. Ricoeur describes how metaphor--particularly the large, cosmological metaphors that Lawrence, like Coleridge, was fond of using in formulating doctrine--creates a discourse of ideas by bringing into the same semantic field word-concepts generally found in entirely different contexts, each term coming charged with diverse and even contradictory associations and definitions, forcing us to think about both separate contexts together and generating new polysemous fields. In this way, metaphor becomes argument, a figurative utterance of discursive ideas. [10]

Lawrence's rhetorical metaphors are further affected as discourse by the different, sometimes clashing, often inconsistent uses to which he puts them not only within a single essay but also over the course of several essays and works of fiction. Although each metaphor creates a new meaning for itself depending on the context of the particular work in which it appears, it also comes immersed in the different metaphorical values it has assumed in other guises in its other contexts, both fictional and nonfictional. One use of a term does not supplant another; nor do they become hybridized.

In the passage cited, the governing metaphor is probably not the obvious contrast between the "quick" and the "dead," terms which are intended mainly to be descriptive, but, as in most Lawrentian genre criticism, the underlying positive comparison between the novel and life. This underlying metaphorical comparison must account for the rhetorical jump from the discussion of the real objects in the room ("That silly iron stove somehow belongs. Whereas this thin-shanked table doesn't belong") to the ensuing doctrinal statement, "And now we see the great, great merits of the novel." Only if the two--the real life objects and the novel as a form--are equated metaphorically does the statement about the "merits of the novel" make the kind of logical sense that its introductory phrase, "and now we see," suggests it should.

Of course for Lawrence, as for Ricoeur, to create a comparison through metaphor is to force consonance through dissonance. When Lawrence says elsewhere that the "novel is the one bright book of life," he deliberately does nol say that the novel is like life (a simile) or that it is full of life (a description) but that it is the "book of life." Immediately upon making this metaphor, however, he adds a supplementary metaphor that would seem to contradict it, pointing out the irreconcilability of his original metaphorical terms. "Books are not life," he writes. "They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble" (Phoenix 535). This supplement, rather than clarifying the first statement, simply introduces new terms into the original mix, placing in different metaphorical proximity and new combinations word-concepts--"life," "book," "tremulations on the ether"--not naturally consonant with one another. As an "explanation," this supplement also tries to q ualify the original metaphor in the language of still another metaphor. By explaining the literal behind the metaphor in a new figurative way, Lawrence wants to create a connection between the novel and life that is at the same time figurative and literal and always in process. This way, Lawrence's use of "supplement," in the Derridian sense of not so much adding to as entirely reformulating the initial statement and deferring its meaning, becomes a crucial recurrent feature of his genre theory.