If a secondary character chances to die—for instance, Quarles’ child in Point Counter Point—that, too, is an incident, outside the work’s proper concerns; the main characters go on arguing as before. When it occurs in a sanatorium, it is just an episode, figuring in the normal mortality rate; a new patient moves into the bed the next day, and the ripple of concern quickly subsides. The sanatorium is an ideal setting for the discussion novel, for time does not count there. Ideas, though some may age, are indifferent to time. Mann speaks of “the more spacious time conceptions prevalent ‘up here.’ ” That is an effect, of course, of the routine, which makes one day like another. But there is an endlessness, an eternal regularity, in all such novels; the characters slip into their places like habitués of a corner café. The sense of eternity may be represented under other aspects. In André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, which I might have included under this heading, Edouard, the chief character, is shown writing a novel in which a facsimile of him is writing a novel, in which, we suppose, still a third figure... The black-hatted Quaker on the Quaker Oats box holding a Quaker Oats box portraying a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box, getting smaller and smaller in infinite regress. In Point Counter Point Huxley borrowed the repeating-decimal device.
Still, when the novel of ideas is spoken of, maybe another type of story is being referred to—a story that does come to some sort of resolution. That is the missionary novel sometimes referred to as a “tract.” On the surface it may look like the kind of novel I have just been trying to analyze, in that it may have the air of a panel discussion, with points of view put forward by several characters speaking in turn and each being allowed equal time. But it soon appears that one speaker is right and the others, though momentarily persuasive, are wrong. I am thinking of D. H. Lawrence.
Of course there are missionary novels that are not novels of ideas, for example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is animated by a strong conviction but, if I remember right, does not “go into” the argument for and against slavery. And there are missionary elements hiding in many tales that pass for thrillers or love stories. In fact it is hard to think of a novel that in some sense does not seek to proselytize. But what I have in mind are books like Women in Love, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where reasoning occupies a large part of the narrative, exerting a leverage that seems to compel the reader’s agreement. The incidents, few or many, press home like gripping illustrations the point being proved. There is something of parable in most of Lawrence’s plots.
In Kangaroo we get a powerful example of Lawrence’s method at work. The ideas, fully expounded in long conversations, far from being unresolved, are boldly lived out and tested. The Lawrence figure, Somers, finds certain already held and seductive ideas made flesh for him in the shape of the Australian working-class leader known as Kangaroo. It is an incarnation Somers had never hoped to come upon, sickened as he is by Europe. He is smitten by Kangaroo’s proto-fascist movement and by the wild fresh country of which working men and their virile matey principles seem to be a natural and harmonious part. The infatuation holds for many pages; he is drawn into the movement as a sympathetic foreign observer. He is nearly converted when, rather abruptly, he is startled into closer inspection: Kangaroo, dying, asks for a declaration of Somers’ love, and the sickly plea lets Somers finally see the soft, weak, flabby underside of native fascism. The Australian spell is broken; Somers and his woman leave.
Up to the end, however, an equilibrium of ideas is maintained, so that the conversations remain interesting, by no means one-sided. In Somers, a genuine intellectual process, going from curiosity to attraction to repulsion and disillusionment, is shown with considerable honesty. It is typical of Lawrence at his best that even when Kangaroo and his ideas are rejected, he is not vulgarly “seen through”; something is left for a kind of dry pity and understanding.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is surely the most biased of Lawrence’s books. Yet Sir Clifford, Lady Chatterley’s husband, is nonetheless given his say, not too unfairly represented by and large; it is only that he and his entire set of convictions are refuted out of hand by a quiet adversary, Mellors, whose strong point is not words but performance. His performance is itself an argument, speaking for a view of natural life and sexuality that is hostile to the intellect. Sir Clifford is no intellectual; he is a retired country gentleman who sometimes writes poetry and short stories. But the weapons he is familiar with and falls back on as a disabled champion of a social order and mild way of life are the weapons his education has taught him to use: received notions and principles.