D. H. Lawrence: A Comment

Kenneth Asher, in his stimulating article 'D. H. Lawrence and the Ethical Life' (CQ 40/2), does his best to persuade us that Lawrence is a thinker we should take seriously, but it is, I think, against his better judgement: he even refers to the 'silliness' of parts of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Of course, Lawrence's ideas are of interest as they are his, but Jessie Chambers was, I think, right when she said that 'All his theorising had its origin in his personal dilemmas', and found it boring. Of course, as Asher maintains, his theories do have relevance to his fiction, but even so, it is only a limited relevance and, indeed, may obscure appreciation of what Lawrence is actually doing, as much of his fiction is more traditional than his theories might lead us to expect. As a novel there is nothing particularly innovatory about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence's completely positive view of Lady Chatterley's secret affair with her husband's gamekeeper and the explicitness of his descriptions of their genital relations represent a difference from the traditional valuation of such goings on and traditional reticence about what specifically went on, but that in itself is not a difference in method.

In discursive prose aiming at establishing a truth, there is no substitute for reasoned argument and the use of relevant evidence. But there is an erroneous idea that Professor Asher seems to share: that the adoption of such procedures implies emotional detachment from the truth so established and so there must be more emotionally involved short cuts to a truer truth than that establishable by reason. Not at all: I may demonstrate by objective argument that slavery is unjust and be passionate about ending it precisely because I regard my argument to be rationally unanswerable. Passionate rationality can lead emotions to function heuristically to make one aware of truths one didn't fully realise before but, in my view, the emotions associated with irrationality cannot so function, though it would take an argument longer than I have space for here to demonstrate that. What is not or should not be acceptable is to believe, as Nietszche apparently did, that truth can be established by a form of shouting which tries to bypass rational argument and to bully readers into accepting the truth of what is said merely on the say so of the sayer. You cannot try to subvert hitherto accepted truths, as Nietszche tried to do, by mere assertion accompanied by abuse ('socialist dolts and flatheads') of those who disagree with you. Nietszche may assert that 'egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul...other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves', but there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe him.

Lawrence was influenced by Nietszche and adopted his mode of discourse. But he takes it even further, not confining himself to questions of value as Nietszche did but making assertions as to matters of fact: 'The sun is materially composed of the effluence of the dead.' Well, it isn't. And not content with making such ridiculous assertions he issues a series of orders which makes one glad that he did not have the power to implement them: 'elementary education should be stopped at once'; 'they [i.e. children] should not be told that the earth is round'. Nor does Lawrence see that he is sawing off the bough on which he is sitting: 'The ideal is evil no matter what ideal it be.' But any statement condemning ideals is itself recommending an ideal, even if it is one that asserts there should be no ideals.

We must accept that there are certain crucial facts about human experience we can never be sure about, and to use a Nietzschean mode of mere assertion like Lawrence when trying to explain them is to substitute dogmatism for a close consideration of the difficulties they present us with. We know that some of the workings of our minds are no more accessible to consciousness than the workings of our bodies (we are...