Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

In November 1925, D.H. Lawrence wrote his famous essay on “Why the Novel Matters,” with its much-quoted proclamation that “[t]he novel is the one bright book of life,” which, unlike “poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book,” can “make the whole man alive tremble” (195). In the same month, he wrote another essay, “The Novel and the Feelings.” Lawrence begins by drawing a distinction between the “emotions”—“things we more or less recognise” and can readily name as love, hate, fear, anger, or greed—and the “whole stormy chaos of ‘feelings’” that reside in “the dark continent of [the] self,” the former likened to “domesticated animals” and the latter to “wild creatures” whose “muffled roarings” and “stifled shrieks” have been suppressed by modern man (202). Whilst the emotions have become our docile companions, Lawrence argues, “[w]e have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not even exist for us,” so successful have we been in our efforts “to exclude this in-bounding, in-leaping life” (203). This state of affairs might be parlous, but there is a glimmer of hope. It is to the novel that Lawrence would have us turn in our efforts “to cultivate our feelings” (204):

Now we have to educate ourselves, not by laying down laws and inscribing tablets of stone, but by [. . .] listening-in to the voice of the honourable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body, from the God in the heart. Listening inwards, inwards, not for words nor for inspiration, but the lowing of the innermost beasts, the feelings, that roam in the forest of the blood, from the feet of God within the red, dark heart. [. . .] If we can’t hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny.

(205)

Clotted with febrile imagery, reliant on racist invocations of “the aboriginal jungle” (202) and “the darkest Africa inside us” (203), and so contorted in its argumentation as to be almost incoherent, this essay, unsurprisingly, has been critically overlooked. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that “The Novel and the Feelings” offers salutary lessons for contemporary modernist studies in a moment when the preoccupation with affect is rapidly becoming de rigueur.

At first blush, Lawrence’s terminological distinctions between the feelings and the emotions closely resembles those between affect and emotion drawn by early affect theorists, the latter conceived as less amenable to linguistic representation and arising not from the “waste-paper basket of ideas at the top of my head” but “some other part of my anatomy” (202). Yet the terms, however proximate, do not neatly map on to each other, but are premised on very different understandings of subjectivity: Lawrence’s on a quasi-anthropological, vitalist vision, and affect theory on postwar psychological research—research that, as Ruth Leys so powerfully demonstrates in The Ascent of Affect (2017), has proven less scientifically indubitable than proponents of affect theory tend to want to recognize. Such divergences should not only caution us from cleaving to the definitions so forcefully asseverated by early affect theorists, but also more generally enjoin us to be more historically particularizing in our accounts of writers’ conceptualizations of affective experience, which necessarily entails a greater willingness to take seriously the language of emotion, feeling, and sincerity that has too often been dismissed as empty sentimentalism lacking analytic heft. The last five years have seen a small but growing number of critics expressing skepticism about what Wendy Anne Lee characterizes as “the ‘presentist’ tilt of affect theory” (4)—though it is worth saying that these are often critics who nevertheless continue to draw on affect theory rather than turn to alternative intellectual traditions, Xine Yao’s objections to affect theory’s presumptions of universality in Disaffected (2021) being a case in point. Few objects demonstrate the pitfalls of too readily mapping contemporary conceptualizations of affective...