Excess and Economy in Sons and Lovers

Abstract

The novel has future....Instead of snivelling about what and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it's got to break way through, like hole in the wall. And the public will scream and say it sacrilege: because, of course, when you've been jammed for long time in tight corner, and you get really used to its stuffiness and its tightness, till you find it suffocatingly cozy; then, of course, you're horrified when you see new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. --D. H. Lawrence, Surgery for the Novel--or Bomb, 520 In the 1925 essay Morality and the Novel, D. H. Lawrence gives us what surely one of his meilleurs mots: If you try to anything down, in the he writes, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the (528). While often taken to be warning against exhaustive interpretations, (1) the context from which line so often orphaned suggests more precise meaning. To begin with, Lawrence has in mind the composition of novel, not its reception. But more significantly, the witticism encapsulates something crucial to Lawrence's view of ontology and the poetics it supports. Unlike religion and philosophy, both of which are concerned with down--defining, taxonomizing, separating--the world and its inhabitants, the novel's business is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment (527). Indeed, when executed morally--that is, when true to the complexity of life--the novel conveys a relationship, relatedness (529). Life, for Lawrence, nothing else but just such pure relatedness, or as he claims, this perfected relation between man and his circumambient universe itself, for mankind (527). Like his contemporary Virginia Woolf, for whom the capture of strikingly similar life was the categorical imperative of fiction, Lawrence here thinks of the novel's involvement with the pure relatedness of in ethical or moral terms. The danger, or rather immorality, in trying to pin down something in the novel that the novel's intimate relation with life threatened. At worst, it forfeited altogether, bringing down the novel with it; at best, it lives on in spite of the novelist's foolhardy intervention, though likely in maimed capacity. One of the questions of paper concerns what it means to nail something down within the novel, and how novel operating within formal tradition very much invested in various manners and degrees of nailing things down--here, that of the Bildungsroman or novel of development--might go about resisting such tendencies. Lawrence suggests that the quickest route to novelistic to give free rein to one's ruling passion, what he calls the novelist's helpless, unconscious predilection (529). Thus, provided his conscious self does not intervene and moderate, the novelist in the throes of love will write novel likewise in the throes of love. Such novel imbalanced, insofar as it denies human experience its variety and reduces to falsifying sameness. Woolf, again an ally here, might refer to such novel as egotistical, by which she would mean that it lazily accommodates itself to single dominant and dominating perspective that stamps out difference. (2 ) This same immorality can be expressed formally as well. A novel that overly faithful to formal strictures will, unsurprisingly, forfeit Lawrence's precious life. In Lawrence's own work, the tension between form and the dynamism of (which, in its very dynamism, tends to disrupt form) perhaps the most aesthetically productive and compelling quality of his work. Particularly, the incongruity between the development narrative and the pure connectivity of accounts both for Lawrence's distinctive brand of modernism and his seemingly retrograde sincerity. (3) To certain extent, the idea of Bildang--of self-cultivation, of development, of growth--is central to all of his novels. …