D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 2)

Rhea Daniel: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (2017)

doodleaddicts.com

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and future possibilities.

After writing three earlier essays on this theme - two of which we discussed in the first part of this post - Lawrence wrote a further couple of essays on the novel in 1925, neither of which were published in his lifetime (or even typed). They first appeared in print in Phoenix (1936), along with other posthumous texts, edited by Edward D. McDonald. 

III. Why the Novel Matters

For Lawrence, the novel matters because it teaches us to recognise and to revere the life of the body; to know that "paradise is in the palm of your hand" [194], which - if you put it in Latin - would make a fitting motto above the door of a school of masturbation, were such an institution ever to be established.

Priests and philosophers may prefer to talk of the spirit - or the soul, or the mind - but the novelist knows that every individual ends at their own finger-tips. It's a simple truth, says Lawrence, but one that it's difficult to get people to agree on and stick to. It's also the core idea of his vitalism and for Lawrence, nothing is more amazing than life which exists nowhere but within the living body; be that the body of a man or even a cabbage in the rain.

One of the reasons that Lawrence hates modern science is because, in his view, the latter has no use for living bodies; it is only interested, rather, in the organism, which is a metaphysical overcoding of the body and its organs and the establishment of a bio-logical hierarchy within it. Great novelists are interested in dis-organ-ising the body and building what Deleuze and Guattari term (after Artaud) a body without organs, or what Lawrence describes as "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts" [196]. 

Novels, of course, are not actually alive; they are "only tremulations on the ether" [195]. But the novel can make the living body of man tremble and unleash strange forces and flows of becoming. That is why the novel is "the one bright book of life" [195] and can help prevent readers from joining the legions of the undead (according to Lawrence, there are many men and women walking about like zombies and eating their dinners like masticating corpses).   

Thus, the novel doesn't teach you how to be good: it does, rather, something far more important than that; it cultivates an instinct for life ...

IV. The Novel and the Feelings

Lawrence isn't impressed with civilised humanity, always harping on the same old note: "Harp, harp, harp, twingle-twingle-twang!" [201] The note itself is okay; it's the exclusiveness (and repetition) that becomes unbearable. He also thinks that we are poorly educated concerning the self, despite the fact that, as a species, we have "combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp" [201].

Ultimately, most individuals know more about the composition of celluloid and the latest fashion in shoes than about the stormy chaos within. But, says Lawrence, the times they are a-changin' and "wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us" [202]. If you listen carefully, you can hear them calling, although some are completely silent, like slippery fishes. Lawrence calls these wild creatures feelings, which he contrasts with emotions:

"Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a [...] decadent panther [...] We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through its nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service." [202] 

For the feelings, we do not as yet even have a language - and most often do not even allow that they exist, despite the fact that we only exist "because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us" [203].

Coming over all Nietzschean, Lawrence argues that man is the only creature who has deliberately - and successfully - tamed himself, fatally mistaking tameness for civilisation. The problem is that tameness, like an addictive drug, destroys us in the end, by robbing us of self-control and the power of command.

We thought tameness would lead to happiness - and, in a sense, maybe it has; albeit the happiness of the last man. But, ultimately, it leads to madness and an orgy of destruction, and unless we "connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources" [204] we shall degenerate inside our own enclosures.

We have, says Lawrence, to un-tame ourselves and learn to cultivate the feelings. But, of course, that's not easy: "It is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be taken seriously." [204]

Psychoanalysis won't help - for the Freudians show the greatest horror of all when confronted by the Old Adam, whom they regard as a monster of perversity. We have to listen, rather, "to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body" [205].

And if we can't hear their voices within ourselves, well, then, we can do the next best thing: "look in the real novels, and there listen in" [205]. Not to the didactic assertions or personal opinions of the author, "but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny" [205].

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 191-98 and 199-205.

Readers interested in part one of this post on 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', should click here. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 1)

Henry Rayner: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (1929)

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and its future possibilities. No surprise, therefore, that he wrote several short essays on the subject ...

I. The Future of the Novel

Is the novel still in its infancy as an art form - or is it on its death-bed? 

It was a question in 1923 and it's still a question now, almost 100 years later; albeit no longer a question that many people care about (which perhaps says more about us rather than the contemporary novel).

The answer, for Lawrence, is that the "pale-faced, high-browed, earnest novel which you have to take seriously" [151] is senile precocious. That is to say, it's childishly self-absorbed: I am this, I am that, I am the other.    

One assumes that Lawrence is not referring to his own works here, though heaven knows his novels can be so sincere and intense at times, that one might fairly describe them as earnest and overwrought. Lawrence, though, is taking a pop at the novels by writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust; authors who "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" [152]. 

He doesn't think much of the smirking popular novel either; just as self-conscious and also written by those who think it funny to drag their adolescence into middle age and even old age.

The novel, declares Lawrence, has got to grow up: by which he means stop with the played out emotional and self-analytical stunts and find the "underlying impulse that will provide the motive-power for a new state of things" [154].

Interestingly, this requires that fiction and philosophy come together again: reuniting into a new form of myth and a new way of understanding. The novel has got a future, concludes Lawrence, providing it has the courage to "tackle new propositions without using abstractions [and ...] present us with new, really new feelings [...] which will get us out of the old emotional rut [155].    

II. Morality and the Novel

What is the business of art?

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." [171]

That's a succinct and interesting definition: one that might be said to anticipate actor-network theory, even whilst remaining anthropocentric in that it posits man as the centre of a universe about whom all things revolve. 

And morality?

"Morality is that delicate, forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness." [172]

That's another concise definition: one that allows us to understand why it is Lawrence values the novel above all else. For whilst works of philosophy, religion, or science are all of them busy trying to nail things down with laws and fixed ideals in order to establish stability, the novel insists on difference and becoming.

Lawrence writes:  

"The novel is the highest complex of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." [172]

And immorality?

Immorality is the attempt by an author, for example, to impose themselves upon a text and tip the balance one way or the other, thus bringing to an end the tembling instability upon which everything in the social and natural world - including the world of fiction - depends. They might not even intend to do this; often the immorality of the novel is due to the novelist's unconscious bias or predilection.  

For an artist to remain moral, he or she must affirm a general economy of the whole in which all things, all ideas, and all feelings are admitted and none are thought to be supreme or exclusively worth living for:

"Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to.
      All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two [actants ...] If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, for tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship [...] and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction." [173]

This helps explain why Lawrence often brands seemingly pure and innocent works false and obscene and why he famously advises readers to always, always trust the tale, not the teller.

If the novel reveals or helps establish vivid relationships that gleam with a fourth dimensional quality, then it is a moral work, no matter how the relationships may be judged from the perspective of conventional morality. And if these relationships also happen to be new and displace old connections, then even better - no matter how much pain they cause, or what offence they may give:

"Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music" [175] - but who wants art that only makes comfortable and complacent?  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 149-155 and 169-176. 

See also the first version of 'Morality and the Novel' which is published as an appendix in the above, pp. 239-245. It ends with the following two lines that essentially summarise Lawrence's thinking on the novel: "The novel is the one perfect medium for revealing to us the changing glimmer of our living relationships. The novel can help us live as no other utterance can help us. It can also pervert us as no other can." [245] I have to admit - as a perverse materialist - the latter notion intrigues and I wish Lawrence had said more about it. 

Readers interested in part two of this post on Lawrence's essays 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', should click here. 

On the Quickness and Allure of Objects

Phoebe Stadler: Saucy (c. 1920)

collections.vam.ac.uk

Was ist Schnelligkeit? asks Heide. And it's an interesting question.

I suppose, for me at least, the quality of quickness is something I understand in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence and in terms of an object-oriented ontology.

In his essay 'The Novel' (1925), Lawrence describes the quick as an invisible flame of impersonal presence that flickers in the words and deeds of the individual. Unless, that is, they belong to the legions of the undead; living corpses with ready-made sensations who drive to work, chew their fast food, stare at the screen, and engage in idle talk that merely passes the word along (what Heidegger calls Gerede).

These men and women are awfully lifelike, but lifeless; for they have no quickness, writes Lawrence.

It's important to be clear on this point: the corpse-bodies Lawrence fears have not become less than human, but, strange as it may sound - unless one hears this phrase with Nietzschean ears - all too human (which is to say, all too limited and cut-off). Quickness is, therefore, certainly not the same as human being; in fact, it's the non-human element of man which is found in all things.

Lawrence likes to call it the God-flame, but I prefer to describe it as object-allure, if only because I find his religious language unhelpful and off-putting.* Either way, it means we have two types of object: (i) those that are quick (though not necessarily alive in the conventional organic sense of the term) and (ii) those that are dead (again, not in the sense that they lack or have lost life, but in the sense that they aren't quick or very alluring - and so don't really affect us in the same way).

Lawrence writes:

"In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn't even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead." 

Thus, interestingly - according to Lawrence - there are degrees of quickness; though he claims not to know how or why this is so, even if he knows for certain that it's the case. Probably, he speculates, the quickness of the quick lies in a "certain weird relationship" between objects; one that is "fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful".

Again, I would discuss this relatedness in terms of allure; objects attract and lead other objects, including ourselves, into temptation and it's in this way that we and all things come into touch. The more they entice us, the stronger their allure, the quicker they are; the more we come into touch - with "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper"** - the quicker we are.

Of course, even dead objects retain some power of attraction and can seduce us - they like to be tickled as Lawrence puts it - but ultimately they lead us not into touch but into the void. Dead objects, in other words, tease but don't deliver the goods; they are indifferent to those doing the tickling and drain the quick of their quickness. They are strange attractors, like black holes.       

Notes

* I like the word allure as it is drawn from the language of seduction, which is the appropriate language in which to discuss objects philosophically. One might also note that the modern English word quick is of Germanic origin and is related not only to the Dutch term kwiek, meaning sprightly, but the German word keck, meaning saucy; another term belonging to the language of seduction. In sum, quickness goes beyond merely a question of speed - it's more than Schnelligkeit - just as it's more than vitality.

** With the use of a list like this, composed of seemingly random objects, Lawrence wishes to show that there are no absolutes; all things exist relative to one another upon a flat ontological field and/or within a general economy of the whole. We can call this a democracy of objects, like Levi Bryant, or a democracy of touch, like Lawrence.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-90. Lines quoted p. 183.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Cry of the Masses', Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 511-12.