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

Style, Spring, 2000 by Joan Douglas Peters

In "Morality and the Novel," the theses of the other two essays, the relativity of "truth" and the relations of parts to whole, become subservient to a larger argument against didacticism in the novel. Unlike the other essays, where his rhetoric evolves from the process of argument, here Lawrence has a clear linguistic strategy. [11] He takes the word "morality" and inverts its meaning to create his own metadiscourse, defining as "immoral" any imposition of "morality" in art: "Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of this balance. When the novelist puts his thumb on the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality" (Phoenix 520). By deliberately adopting as his own the word conventionally used to represent the concept he is refuting, Lawrence in effect allows himself to fall into a self-contradictory philosophical trap. Although obviously he is not writing a novel here, his simple declarative statements about what is "moral" and what is "immoral" rhetorically dupli cate, rather than challenge, what he is condemning as didactic in the novel as a form. In this essay, Lawrence's point regarding genre theory is that the relations among the elements (people and things) in a novel must be allowed to develop unfixed by any predetermined authorial theory. In this way, he says, the real "life" of the novel will be free to emerge:

A thing isn't life just because somebody does it. This the artist ought to know perfectly well. The ordinary bank clerk buying himself a new straw hat isn't "life" at all: it is just existence, quite all right, like everyday dinners: but not "life." By life we mean something that gleams, that has the fourth-dimensional quality. If the bank clerk feels really piquant about his hat, if he establishes a lively relation with it, and goes out of the shop with the new straw on his head a changed man, be-aureoled, then that is life. (Phoenix 529-30)

Note how perfectly the phrasing of his description of the bank clerk and his hat rhetorically performs the theory that Lawrence is describing ("piquant," for example, seeming just the right word both to describe and embody the "lively" relation a bank clerk might have with his new hat). But note too what happens as that description is reduced to abstraction. When Lawrence takes the "man-and-his-hat" metaphor and prescribes what about this particular combination is and is not "life," he himself is doing the very thing that he

condemns in other novelists--he forces "life" to fit a personal theory about it. We might indeed be reminded of his statement in "Why the Novel Matters": "What we mean by living is, of course, just as indescribable as what we mean by being. Men get ideas into their heads of what they mean by Life, and they proceed to cut life out to a pattern" (Phoenix 537). In the process, however, he also rhetorically performs the whole of his argument, dramatizing through his own dictatorial rhetoric t he diminishing effects of defining life by words, "moral" and "immoral"--words inverted from their conventional usage but still strongly charged with conventional meaning--all to impose moral (or, in his lexicon, immoral) judgments against those who would impose morality on their novels.