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

Style, Spring, 2000 by Joan Douglas Peters

When Lawrence, in describing the novel in this cited passage, insists on defining his working terms, the "quick" and the "dead," according to a neat, absolute binary formulation, his words should therefore appear suspect: "And the sum and total of all deadness we may call human" sounds very much like a parody of the biblical proverb-making he satirizes only a moment before. He called this proverb rhetoric "sermon-on-the-mounting," yet he does it himself, mischievously and self-mockingly, throughout his own criticism. Even the word play on the modal aspects of the verbs ("We will call God"; "we may call human") is a bit too transparently clever to be trusted. Add to this the fact that Lawrence, after announcing that the "novel can't exist without being quick," goes on to describe the "unquick" novel that, although it might "disappear into nothingness," is a novel just the same. Add to this, the deliberate, convoluted metaphorical silliness of the dead burying the dead, liking to be tickled and forgetting who has tickled them, and we must conclude that Lawrence, through his use of rhetoric, wants to demonstrate that categorical statements should not be taken categorically.

So why should Lawrence make the statements at all? For one thing, because their immediately inaccessible figurality invariably leads to supplements that pretend to explain them. As explanations and qualifications, these supplements are, if less vague, themselves essentially figural, complicating and expanding the original metaphorical statements and encouraging us, in turn, to look further, and to think more, for understanding. When immediately after his proverbial definition of the quick and the dead, Lawrence identifies the "quick" rather awkwardly as "an odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness" and then maintains that "the novel cannot exist without being quick," his words, perhaps by virtue of their awkwardness, convey an air of sincerity and, despite their essential figurality, do in fact make a kind of sense within the trajectory of the whole work. Later on in this same essay, Lawrence explains that it is perfectly natural, perfectly human to look for some absolute, some God (wi th a capital G) and even for the novelist to have a single moral purpose ("Any novel of any importance," he says, to start the essay off, "has a purpose"). When we look back in this light at his categorical definition of the "dead" as "human," it also makes sense, even if the word "dead" sounds a bit too severe. It is human, and dead, to see truth as absolute.

Now consider Lawrence's other statements, that "the novel contains no didactic absolute. All that is quick and all that is said and done by the quick is in some way godly." These claims would seem to be contradictions in terms ("godly" being generally synonymous with "didactic absolute") until again we read on in the essay for Lawrence's definition, or literal understanding, of "God." He writes:

It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are, and have been, and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them, falls flat. This makes eternity lively.