Still from The Rocking Horse Winner (dir. Anthony Pelissier, 1949),
showing Valerie Hobson as Hester Grahame and the shadow of John Howard Davies
as her son Paul upon his magical wooden steed
Having just re-read it, I was hoping to write something provocative on 'The Rocking Horse Winner', Lawrence's short story first published in the American fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, in July 1926.
But, unfortunately, I've so far failed to even get out of the starting gate. Indeed, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that anyone attempting a new interpretation is likely to find themselves flogging a dead horse. For between them, the Freudian, Marxist, and Christian critics have done an effective job of foreclosing the text; they've nobbled it, so to speak.
For Freudians, Lawrence's story is simply a classic tale of Oedipal desire with scenes of sublimated masturbation thrown in for good measure; easy to understand by any one with a working knowledge of psychoanalysis. Hester's reliance on her young son to satisfy her needs, emotional and economic, rather than her hapless husband - and Paul's frantic attempts to do so - tragically arrest his development and lead to his premature death.
For Marxists - less interested in sex and the libidinal unconscious and more concerned with class and the role of cash within a commodity theory of exchange - and for Christians - convinced that the love of money is the root of all evil - the tale is also very straightforward and easy to explain. For the former, capitalism dissolves the human bonds that tie us together; for the latter, all forms of materialism lead to sin.
I would like to find and to offer something more; something, for example, that allows us to relocate desire from the nursery and free it from its entrapment within the Oedipal triangle of Mummy-Daddy-Me; or something that allows us to conclude other than that greed is bad, luck is vulgar, and there's merely shit in the hearts of the bourgeoisie.
But Lawrence, who at other times goes out of his way to prove himself anti-Freudian, anti-Bolshevist, and anti-Christian, gives us so little else to work or play with in this story. He's so unambiguously opposed to wealth, success, and even good fortune - not to mention so openly contemptuous of Hester - that he can't help producing a tale that virtue signals its sympathies and its prejudices too clearly, too crudely (as, arguably, he does in much of his later fiction - including his notorious last novel).
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Rocking Horse Winner', in The Woman Who Rode away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For me, as for many others, The Rocking Horse Winner remains a haunting and deeply moving imaginative and emotional experience, well worth re-visiting - of therapeutic value, and having profound relevance to current concerns over the epidemic of mental illness in the young and the level of addiction to gambling.
ReplyDeletePromoted, with a little appropriate praise, rather than superciliously or sneeringly dismissed, this little "ghost story" could prove a valuable antidote to the spate of tiny horror-ads put out by the betting industry, depicting horribly deranged young men, faces lit-up manically, holding mobile devices, fantasising they have supernatural "rocking horse" powers, enabling them to win against the odds.
All other of its important themes and merits aside, Lawrence's little cautionary tale could be of terrific contemporary significance in countering such destructive supernatural insanity as the betting programmes and such mad ads.
Ludicrous over-expectations and consequent loss lead to depression, debt, damaged marriages, deprived children and all manner of mental illness. As Andrew Harrison writes in The Life of D.H. Lawrence, "The ending of the story exposes the grotesqueness of a world in which the desire for cash impedes our capacity for love." Lawrence is tapping into deadly fixations which adversely affect today's society.
P.S. The voices in Paul's head are heard as clamorously loud by those susceptible today, and with similarly catastrophic outcomes. Shame on Betfred. Ladbrokes, Paddy Power and the lousy lot in that multi-million pound industry for their cruel exploitation of people, as well as animals such as horse and greyhounds.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the prompt to re-read this story,whatever it may 'mean'. He always strikes me as a man in search of God or gods,and I see Lawrence (in his last, feverish years), as the little boy,trying to pick the 'Winner'or at least trying to name them.Who knows?Just enjoy it for it's vividness, even though it's quite a rough ride at times. Talking of vivid, the previous commentator left me with an inexplicably startling image of a pugnacious little jockey, complete with cap, riding his favourite hobby horse,and whipping himself into a frenzy. Whoa,boy...
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