The Rocking-Hor Winner: Overview
Critic: Simon Baker
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jianrenSource: Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st ed., edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994
Criticism about:decision making D(avid) H(erbert Richards) Lawrence (1885-1930), also known as:小学英语词汇 David Herbert Richards Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert Richards) Lawrence, Jessie Chambers, Lawrence H. Davison, David Herbert Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrencefly power
Genre(s): 儿童服装搭配 Short stories; Travel literature; Novels; Plays; Poetry; Translations; Psychological novels; Literary criticism; Letters (Correspondence); Essays
The final stories of D.H. Lawrence, written in the middle and late 1920's, reprent a period of formal experimentation, in which he moved away from traditional narrative realism and the ttings of rural and urban England to the realm of the mythical, supernatural fairy story. As Frank O'Connor said, the withdrawal of the n of actuality pushes the stories, clor t
o the tales of Puskin and Poe rather than the studious realism of Chekhov and Maupassant. Yet that n of the miraculous always prent in Lawrence's narrative saves them from becoming mere exercis in the occult and uncanny.
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"The Rocking-Hor Winner" (collected in The Lovely Lady, 1933), Lawrence's cond attempt to write a contribution for a collection of ghost stories compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1926, is a fusion of various narrative modes. Perhaps clor to the German Märchen (in its bleakness) than the fairy story, it is a conscious artistic adaptation of the oral storytelling technique. It combines elements of the supernatural and the fable with a variety of Lawrence's favourite traits, such as the unhappy marital relationship, the capitalist obssion with money and work, and the pervasive xual and religious symbolism. The characters only live in so far as they progress the narrative, making the story similar to Doyle Springer's definition of an "apologue," an overt and stylized parable where the characters are never our prime concern, since some idea shapes the whole. volunteered[that is, in such stories, we are more interested in “ideas”—themes rather than characters]
The basic plot concerns a middle-class couple who live beyond their means, and the effect this has on their young son. Upt by his mother's unhappiness, and mindful of her belief that the family are "unlucky," he ts out to discover "luck," and thereby obtain wealth. He cures both by riding his rocking-hor to the point of frenzy, and magically coming up with the names of winners in classic races, aided by his uncle and the gardener. However, the fortune he amass doesn't bring his mother the happiness he had expected, and in an effort to pursue still greater wealth he collaps and dies at the very moment of his greatest victory.
The suspension of incredulity required by the reader is barely apparent becau of the subtlety with which Lawrence narrates the events:
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.
The fairy tale simplicity of the opening ntence is echoed in his next story, "The Man Wh
o Loved Islands," a more overt moral fable. The short ntences, divided into two or three syntactical claus each time, impart the n of a fixed, eternal unfolding of events with their nurry rhyme simplicity, especially the repetition of "she," "yet," and "and" at the beginning of each clau. This linguistic repetition is themed throughout the narrative, with the stress falling on the phras "there must be more money," "luck," and "when I'm sure." The spectral quality is reinforced by the first of tho phras being given to inanimate objects, the satire on the consumerism and rapacity of polite society emphasized by the hou furnishings:
And yet the voices in the hou, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: "There must be more money!"
The avaricious nature of the capitalist ethos is wryly parodied by the number of proverbs and clichés that are either directly stated or associated with the tale. The phra "lucky in money, unlucky in love" assumes the mantle of a double entendre as the events unfold; "t
he wooden hor that takes its rider nowhere" symbolis the capitalist urge for advancement merely to maintain the status quo.
A tribute to Lawrence's narrative control are the astonishing number of symbolic patterns in the text, which defy any single, coherent reading. The two most obvious are images associated with x and religion. Paul has an Oedipal urge to replace his failed father in a family where money is taken as the nexus of affection. The symbolism of xual activity centres on Paul's "mount," which is "forced" onwards in a "furious ride" towards "frenzy." Readers familiar with "St. Mawr," or the famous description of Gerald Crich and the stallion in Woman in Love,cottonfield will need no introduction to Lawrence's suggestiveness in such descriptions. Likewi, it is impossible to ignore the allusions toward masturbation in Paul's "cret of crets" (especially in his death scene) if one recalls Lawrence's ntiments in his essay "Pornography and Obscenity": "Masturbation is the one thoroughly cret act of the The body remains, in a n, a corp, after the act of lf-abu."
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