So it was that, as I found my admiration and excitement for Women in Love beginning to wane throughout this last chunk of reading, I could only narrow my eyes and knot my brow when I moved on to Lawrence's essays on the importance of the novel. Lawrence commits a great crime of hubris, as ignominious as any of his characters', when he proclaims his literary art the highest practice, the greatest form of, what say you, "living" study, "breathing" academia? No, no, no, no; his living hands which end at his fingertips are such hands that seek to bury its rivals and claim supremacy; his declarations, his proclamations of the insufficiency of these other realms of knowledge seems an attempt to undermine the lucrative possibilities of both reason and mystery each discipline offers to our life experiences. Yes, Lawrence does not fail to acknowledge that philosophy, science, and religion have some value: "I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness"(185). Beyond the whole novel, he tells us, nothing else provides the proper nutrition, all other disciplines fail to fulfill. In this assertion, Lawrence intentionally murders the merit of those many darlings we encounter along the path of our educational development, tyrannically trying to seize the capacity of our attention and care for his own purposes.
You fervently announce, Lawrence, "I am man alive"? I respond, with neither the pathetic sing-song nor the insipid cry of your many women characters, that you are just so and nothing more; the "whole hog" of the life we experience is one of unknown limits of possibility, change, variation--ideas of knowledge or a lack thereof, and ways in which such ideas can and cannot affect our lives. Yes, we may be said to be foremost alive, but let me momentarily return to your beginning Cartesian dichotomy: our bodies are generally fed in the same way, but of our minds we cannot say, and as far as I am concerned we need not be limited and diminished by the intellectual hierarchies and pretenses of one. We are each and all particulars, each and all with a particular bent of what can hurt, hinder, or help our possibilities in life, our abilities to connect with the world around us. Lawrence commits as much dogmatic treason in both essays as those characters he simultaneously critiques.
Note 1: And I believe I should be allowed to as hyperbolic, assuming, brash, and melodramatic as I have been in this post, for so Lawrence seemed to me. Unfortunately I feel I sound just as dogmatic as he, but admit now that I claim no permanent verity to my above statements.
Note 2: But to end on a more personal note, I did quite enjoy his mention of the "beastly Kant." What a bully!
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ReplyDeleteAs vivid as your opposition is to Lawrence's position, my excitement over this essay was equal if not greater. He was not trying tu murder the other scholarly pursuits. He claimed superiority on the grounds that the novel is the only discipline that encompasses all of human experience rather than pieces of it. Psychology, religion, philosophy, physics and politics all add to the greater experience but none of them explore what it is to be "Man Alive" as comprehensively as the novel. For all our knowledge form the sciences, our experience still occurs on different terms. We do not experience emotions as neurotransmitters working in the brain or the feeling of a warm fire as the agitation of atoms. We feel sad or happy and we feel the warmth of the fire. These are the things we know, these are the things that make up being "Man Alive" and these are the things the novel explore better than any science could. Even if we deconstruct our reality down to the very last scientific fact, we would still turn to the novel as a true reflection of what it means to "Be."
ReplyDeleteAbove I was not arguing in defense of the virtues of science or factual understanding, but if you bring them up I would still like to defend them against the claim that they are insufficient, compared to a novel, in showing being. "Being" should not be delimited as a one and only Truth of experience, expressed most properly in one way or another. Novels seek to provide this idea of the "man alive,"--as an art they are oftentimes dedicated to the manifest image. But this, even if it is what we face directly, still does not provide a stereoscopic image of living, and to name it a "true reflection," a superior expression seems to me as assuming and arrogant as any positivistic claim. Wondering at the physics of the world and the science of the human body has the power to fulfill and inspire someone just as much as encountering a powerful account of love in literature. My qualms with Lawrence are founded in his audacity to objectively claim that there is any hierarchy at all, that the novel, exclusively, is the most inclusive form of expression of life. Such notions are sure to exist in every subjective, personal realm, but for one to dictate it across the rest of his fellow man is overreaching. Lawrence is being much too essential.
ReplyDeleteLawrence is essentialist, there's no doubt about it. (I actually think he uses that essentialism in service of a theory of difference, but that's a thought for another day.) What I wanted to observe here is that we might do well to ask of these essays not whether we agree with them or not, but rather what we think Lawrence gets out of making the arguments he makes. Why is he so sold on a certain idea of the novelist? Self-aggrandizement is one answer, I suppose, but it doesn't seem very interesting to me. In other words, what happens if we grant that DHL's notion of science here is impoverished and ask, Why *this* conception of the novel?
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